Living Prism: Itineraries in Comparative Literature 9780773568969

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The Living Prism

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The Living Prism Itineraries in Comparative Literature e va k u s h n e r

Published for Carleton University by McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001 isbn 0-7735-2148-8 (cloth) isbn 0-7735-2208-5 (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 2001 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Senate Research Committee, Victoria University, University of Toronto. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Kushner, Eva The living prism: itineraries in comparative literature Collection of essays, either previously published, or presented as lectures. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2148-8 (bnd) isbn 0-7735-2208-5 (pbk) 1. Literature, Comparative. 2. Literature – History and criticism – Theory, etc. I. Title. pn871.k88 2001 801′.95 c00-901260-5

This book was typeset by Typo Litho Composition Inc. in 10/12 Baskerville.

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Contents

Foreword: Knowledge, Empathy, and Global Village: The Comparative Discourse of Eva Kushner wladimir krysinski / vii Introduction / 3 part one

l e g ac i e s a n d r e n e wa l s

1 Literature in the Global Village / 9 2 Is Comparative Literature Ready for the Twenty-first Century? / 19 3 Towards a Typology of Comparative Literature Studies / 30 4 Literary Studies, Cultural Studies: The Case for a Cease-Fire / 38 5 Comparative Literature in Canada: Whence and Whither? / 51 6 Theory, Theories, Theorizing, and Cultural Relativism / 64 part two changing perspectives in literary history 7 Diachrony and Structure: Thoughts on Renewals in the Theory of Literary History / 71

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Contents

8 From “Time Lost” to “Time Regained” in Literary History / 87 9 On Renaissance Literary Historiography / 98 10 Comparative Literary History among the Human Sciences / 106 11 Comparative Literary History as Dialogue among Nations / 117 12 History and the Power of Metaphor / 127 13 Comparative Literary History in the Era of Difference / 138 pa rt th r e e h i story a nd e ar ly mo de r n subjectivity 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Distant Voices: The Call of Early Modern Studies / 153 History and the Absent Self / 163 The Emergence of the Paradoxical Self / 174 The Renewed Meaning of the Renaissance Dialogue / 190 Erasmus and the Paradox of Subjectivity / 202 In Search of the Obverse Side of Petrarchism / 221 Imagining the Renaissance Child / 232 part four frye

in memory of northrop

21 Northrop Frye and the Possibility of Intercultural Dialogue / 249 22 Northrop Frye and the Historicity of Literature / 257 23 The Social Thought of Northrop Frye / 266 part five

c o m pa r at i v e i m a g i n i n g s

24 Liberating Children’s Imagination / 279 25 Myth and Literature: The Example of Modern Drama / 290 26 Greek Myths in Modern Drama: Paths of Transformation / 300 27 Victor Segalen and China: A Dialectic of Reality and Imagination / 311 Index of Names / 329 Subject Index / 333

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Foreword Knowledge, Empathy, and Global Village: The Comparative Discourse of Eva Kushner WLADIMIR KRYSINSKI

Since the beginning of her university career as a scholar in French literature and as a comparatist, the author of The Living Prism has been committed to the multicultural and multicontextual approach to literature. For Eva Kushner the comparative ethos has always implied understanding through comparison. Understanding what? Worlds and literatures, subjective discourses and collective memories, values, structures and ideas, works and movements, writers in their social, biographical, and individual totality, cognitive passions, legacies, and history. If the didactic and scholarly practice of comparative literature places Canada today among a few avant-garde countries in which this discipline gave rise to a renewal of literary studies, it is thanks to Professor Kushner’s efforts. For a long time Professor Kushner has been recognized as an internationally authoritative scholar, one of the most committed to the study of literature from an international perspective. As the president of the International Association of Comparative Literature she has organized numerous symposia, encounters, publications, and debates. She has successfully contributed to the continuous exchange of ideas between East and West. The Living Prism is a collection of selected essays that have been either previously published or presented as lectures or papers. The rationale of this selection is fully justified. In fact it constitutes a set of critical relevant themes, including the role and the method of comparative literature in a new social, economic, and ideological configuration known by the name of “global village”; the functional relationship

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between history and comparative literature, and the importance of tradition and of the various legacies grounding the humanistic vision of literary and cultural studies that is currently being re-elaborated. Finally, a special section of the volume is dedicated to Northop Frye, seen as a critic whose work helps us better to understand and articulate such problems as intercultural dialogue, historicity, and the sociology of literature. What strikes one in The Living Prism is its wide critical perspective and constant attempt to redefine the status of comparative literature in our “postmodern” era. This search for redefinition crosses cultural and dialogical perspectives. Comparative literature is recognized as a dynamic and open discipline. No matter how complex the matter under scrutiny, comparative literature as viewed by Eva Kushner is in fact a “prismatically living” observation tower committed to the dialogue between various albeit adverse partners. Thus comparative literature, to which Eva Kushner attributes great methodological and epistemological flexibility, is an open field of dialogical scrutiny. It is also an apt method to overcome the entropic Babelian state of affairs posed by the multiplicity of understandings and interpretations of literature and its related domains. Eva Kushner has always been a committed yet objective observer of the Canadian and global comparative scene. She scrutinizes all methodological fluctuations and all internal or external developments of comparative approaches to literature with passion and empathy. Throughout this book the reader will recognize a compelling mediation at work between “time lost” and “time regained.” This formulation refers in a wider sense to the relationships between so-called “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte in terms of Gadamer), which determines any historicity as a valid and semiotically pregnant vantagepoint, and forgotten structures, that is, those excluded from the historic process since they had no specifically important effects. The author of The Living Prism bridges the various critical perspectives and voices of the modern and postmodern literary scene. The diversity of the book is a challenge to any comparatist who might have persisted in understanding literature through influences, sources, and bilateral contacts. The comparative discourse of Eva Kushner demonstrates how our epoch is an extraordinary occasion to promote a new reciprocal understanding among nations through an attentive, comparatively oriented dialogue. The catalogue of comparative material in this book is wide-ranging and diversified. What seems obvious, however, is an oscillation between certain critical themes and certain critical perspectives. In that sense Eva Kushner’s critical discourse rests on at least four guiding princi-

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Foreword

ples, or central avenues of reflexive scrutiny: 1) the principle of historic knowledge and, correlatively, 2) the principle of describing the process of individualization in the Western world (Petrarch, Montaigne, Erasmus); 3) the principle of literary and cultural tradition understood as a system of values that have been promoted in the past and are to be promoted in the present (the historicity of literature recognized as an epistemological value, as intercultural dialogue, and myth as an interpretative matrix of literature and drama); and 4) the principle of the cognitive and functional immediacy of a hic and nunc comparative literature that would be sufficiently open to the changing world. Thus, abiding by these four principles, the critic explains her panoramic presentation of many complicated and significant questions not only of modern hermeneutics but also of comparative literature. The author presupposes the functional intricacy of various views and creations that correlatively express and account for the complexity of what she purposefully names the “living prism,” that is, comparative vision and metacritical perspectives, which are necessary cognitive tools for performing critical work relevant enough to constitute comparative literature as a discipline committed to acting in the global village. The global village is therefore a timely metaphor of the planetary space where communication and information brought about a sort of cosmopolitan spiritual habitat. In such a space human beings consequently act as emitters and receivers, but they also have at their disposal a plethora of tools to convey specific, artistic messages of their identity. The essay “Literature in the Global Village” is a sort of manifesto for and of postmodern comparative literature. Here, Eva Kushner convincingly and relevantly affirms a new role for comparative literature. It has all the necessary intellectual power to become a mediator between specific cultural and literary values and a global, perhaps imaginary (at any rate, virtual) but necessary cosmological audience. Thus, such a comparative literature has to voice and corroborate messages of the local, of the identitary, and of the universal. This fully active and humanistic function of comparative literature Kushner designates as follows: Faced with an explosion of cultural aspirations throughout the world, comparative literature needs to assume forcefully that the universal is already (and has been all along, in often unanalysed ways) at work in the literatures; that we are right in the middle of the global village, and that not only do all literatures already belong – that has long been the assumption of the allied field called world literature – but none of them intrinsically possesses the supreme key to a

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hierarchy of formal or ideational values entitling them to discriminate in authoritative ways among or within themselves and among cultures.

If this affirmation recognizes not merely an obvious but also a necessary state of affairs, one can legitimately interrogate various aspects of the comparative method and of its pregnant results within the limits of The Living Prism. Therefore: What gets compared? Is it possible to compare subjective worlds and ideological structures? Is comparison a valuable critical procedure in order to achieve knowledge? How global is a global village? Do time and space belong to the comparative method necessarily or contingently? Does a literary or artistic event emerge in a brief lapse of time, called by the French historian Fernand Braudel brève durée, whereas literary structures reach their maturity only within a long lapse of time, in Braudel’s terms within a longue durée? How does the historic literary process fulfil itself, and how does it establish a historical continuity between structures? Is there something like comparative understanding at the basis of comparative literature? How do the identitary, the local, the national, and the universal coincide in a given critical perspective? These are among the multiple questions one is tempted to put to the author of these essays. As a matter of fact, by choosing this selection of her various critical studies, Eva Kushner exposes herself to this sort of interrogation. Since The Living Prism is a vertical mosaic of ideas and analyses, each chapter conveys functional elements in order to answer all these questions exhaustively. Comparative literature as discipline has always and proverbially, as it were, suffered an identity crisis both institutional and epistemological. At stake were its object and its method. The affirmation of universality as one of the most fundamental critical fields for comparative literature seems to imply nowadays an efficient relativization if not a dismemberment of Eurocentrism. In the global village all citizens are equal. All values must be shared. During the last thirty years or so, what is still being called comparative literature has moved in various directions in order to integrate within itself new ideas, methods, and approaches towards literature. We have undoubtedly witnessed a transformation of comparative literature. It has assimilated such critical visions as postcolonialsm, gender studies, cultural studies, gay studies, history, and metahistory. At a moment when comparative literature seems to have opened itself up to some new ways of dealing with literature, Eva Kushner’s essays constitute a reminder of some fundamental elements, critical and historic, formal and thematic, that today must be taken into account if one is to rethink comparative literature cognitively.

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Foreword

This, in short, is how I would describe the range, scope, and richness of The Living Prism. It reflects an encyclopedic knowledge of various literatures, and it offers an emphatic reading and interpretation of numerous relevant problems that concern the global human community at the edge of the twenty-first century.

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The Living Prism

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Introduction

The unity of this book lies not in any answers it may bring but in the persistence of its questionings. The circumstances of life, study, and work had led me to the humanities: a smattering of Protestant theology, followed by philosophy, followed in turn by French literature of the twentieth century but gradually also of the sixteenth; and, along these paths, the discovery of comparative literature. These were – and are – widely separate disciplines, guarded by specialists who would view any border trespassing with suspicion. My transgressions were due to the availability of certain programs of study rather than others, and later of teaching and research opportunities, not to an exclusive sense of vocation for what I happened to be currently studying, teaching, researching. It would be untruthful not to state at the outset where that vocation really lay. To state it openly, however, may amount to an invitation to impose a variety of labels upon me. (So be it. In a theoretical discussion a colleague once exclaimed: “But where, in the end, does your allegiance lie?” – by which was meant an ultimatum to identify with one of the schools of thought at hand. I refused to do so – though I was quite prepared to prioritize among them – because I considered them all reactive, historically conditioned, and instrumental to our understanding of culture and of its symbolical creations, including literary texts.) But what was the original impulse to which I have already referred, which was more important to me than any of the specific disciplines within the humanities, and indeed transcended them? It was their common relationship to the understanding of the human person.

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4 The Living Prism

I realize that this confession may immediately have me dubbed a modernist rather than a postmodernist, even prior to any attempt at describing what I mean by “human person.” Have I not heard that the author is dead? That humanism is dead? Not to mention the auspicious liberation of the signifier from the signified, and the silencing of the great metanarratives? Wait a moment! This is not a confession of present faith, but an explanation of the way in which much earlier idea(l)s sustained me through a series of intellectual migrations not always of my choice; or rather, enabled me to realize that they were migrations only if the disciplines were construed as discrete territories. Thus, for me, the oneness of the humanities is not an axiom. It is a practical reality within which responsible scholars can construct the objects of their study in a methodologically rigorous and epistemologically responsible way without coinciding with the job description of disciplines that more often than not are institutional labels. (In other words, interdisciplinarity is not a permission to be superficial but an opportunity to elaborate, in depth, interlocking problematics). As it happens, this perspective is perfectly compatible with present-day philosophies of culture that radically decompartmentalize aspects of cultures to bring to light their interrelatedness. (Some of them also tend to recompartmentalize by constructing cultural identities as self-subsistent units. But that is another story). The field called comparative literature has, over time, and often implicitly, assumed interrelatedness within and among languages as well as cultures. More often than not it has assumed that invariants among literary phenomena, which it is the comparatist’s joy to discover, may point to universals. It is only gradually realizing that universals are hard to come by. What we brandish as universal may be the unanalysed reflection of our own vision. One manifestation of this fault is eurocentricity, but it has been known to operate in other directions as well. Comparative literature has, consequently, become a much more experimental field, dubious not only about traditional models of literary history but about all pre-constructed models, diachronic or synchronic. Indeed, comparative literature has often served as experimental ground for the rest of the humanities. The texts gathered in this book are fragmentary records. (If I were to reconstruct the history of my thinking – a vain enterprise – I would have to mix texts in English and French, the latter being more frequently my mode of expression.) Within the five sections the texts they contain are strongly linked by ongoing questionings. All but one have been previously published or retained for publication. The chronology of publication does not always reflect that of my evolution. The occa-

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5 Introduction

sion for which each text was created, and the date and place of its publication, are noted. The articulation of each section disregards chronology, paying more attention to a kind of internal logic. The reader, however, may feel free to see them as pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, and even combine them differently!

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part one Legacies and Renewals

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1 Literature in the Global Village

From their earliest days comparative literature studies have lived in a paradox: they presuppose universals at work within human literatures and cultures, and seek to bring them to light through the examination of the diversity of these literatures and cultures. In recent decades the entire field of literary studies has undergone a vast movement of selfexamination and self-legitimation as part of a wider movement among the human sciences to demonstrate both their scientific worth and their relevance to the situation and psyche of mankind. The question remains, however, whether this search for truth, necessarily underpinned by questioning the process of knowledge-seeking itself, has its centre of gravity in the particular case or in the commonality of the universal. The easy answer, of course, is that both pursuits are one pursuit. Montaigne, one of the founders of the conscious search for truth through literary expression, has said: “Chaque homme porte en luimême la forme entière de l’humaine condition,” which has mostly been interpreted as meaning that the closest possible study of the particular case – a most difficult study given the elusiveness of the real – has the best chance of encountering the real, at least in some sense, and through it the universal. The great religions also emphasize in the moral field this access to the universal through the particular: in the

Invited paper, presented at the Symposium on Japan’s Place in World Culture, Kyoto, Aug. 1991. Published in Journal of Intercultural Studies, no. 19, Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, 1992:54–61.

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parable of the talents Christ praises faithful attention to detail, and with respect to the poor and hungry he points out that to nourish one of them (the particular case) is to nourish him (the spirit of the whole). Both in Christianity and in humanism, then, the universal fulfils itself in the particular, and knowledge has to begin there as well. How this has been changed to the universal overriding the particular, is a long and most involved page of the intellectual history of the West, and I emphasize the West, if by this we mean mostly Europe and North America. Take, for example, Platonism, all the neo-Platonisms, and kindred types of philosophical dualisms; one of the common features of all these is that the particular, from their perspective, is that which gives access to the universal. Now, I am not saying that it does not; I am saying that wherever all that the particular is thought to accomplish is to give access to the universal, there is likely to arise a tendency to ignore, stifle, or reduce the particular. In 1975 there was an international comparative literature conference in Taiwan on critical theory, Eastern and Western. A major point at issue was the claim to universal application implied by so many Western literary theories; and surely it is still at issue, not whether universals exist, but whether within the span of our knowledge they are rules of thumb or absolutes. The Chinese critics were insistently emphasizing the ultimate benefit of probing the individual author, work, style. Structuralism as well as semiotics had tended, it is true, to universalize by way of reduction, which may account for certain incompatibilities with Eastern critical theories; while more recently Western theoreticians have been revisiting the subjective, the unique, the historical, the Other – all those aspects of reality that resist generalization. Literary scholars aspire, as was seen at the 1991 Lisbon conference on Science and Hermeneutics, to knowledge the validity of which will parallel that of the exact sciences; but they also know that while certain procedures, such as the empirical methods of reception studies, can attain scientific results that can even be tested, and while validating procedures can effectively be used in hermeneutic studies, the breakthrough is yet to come that will establish the specific scientificity of literary studies in a manner that is interculturally valid and does justice to the function of literary studies not only among the human sciences but as part of human reality. This problem, like any other really complex problem, would seem as demanding as squaring the circle were it not that it is not an absolute solution that is required: it is the problematizing process that is important, as it keeps a creative tension between the two poles, and also keeps the researcher critically aware of the limitations of the scientific discourse itself. All this might lead one to think that the epistemological analysis and self-legitimation of literary studies have gone full circle and produced

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a sterilizing effect, showing the limitations of overprivileging the universal as well as the particular, yet remaining unable to lead out of these prolegomena into a discipline demanding to be revitalized in its very roots throughout the global village with its needs for valid symbols. The literary scholar, and particularly the comparative literature scholar, is crucially situated at the intersection of literature and of reflection upon it. We can now look historically at the groundswell of theorization that has been going on for a few decades in the West and say that it has corresponded to the need for self-legitimation and scientific authenticity; we might even admit that for an important fraction of the literary studies community the knowledge of the literary discourse qua discourse became a concern overriding the knowledge of the literary text as such, and at any rate there was conceptually little left of the literary text, torn as it was between its situational relativity and its relativity in terms of reception. In my view the fragmentation of the field of literary studies occurs because the demonstration of this relativity has tended to become an end in itself. To reverse a worn-out metaphor, if you forget the trees to pursue the forest, your trees will die and there will be no forest left. But tending the trees does not mean abandoning the design of the forest. I believe that the various approaches and sub-disciplines represent moments of reflection within the discipline of literary studies. This corresponds not only to a diversity of vocations among scholars but to diverse moments of reflection in the work of every scholar, with of course individual preferences in emphasis. I am not saying that if that were taken into account everything would be so interlocking that there would be no discussion left, but only mutual information to which to listen; I am saying that we would begin to listen to one another better, abandoning mental hierarchies that unavoidably put our own approach above the others. But even that hope is ambitious. Meanwhile, there is the global village; and the reflection I am proposing relates to the unprecedented opportunity literary studies, comparative literature within them, have to serve and conserve literature globally in the global village. In the Renaissance, and again in the Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism was a privileged tendency; these periods have often provided examples of a benevolent literary universalism pointing to a field of study where all literary phenomena would become, so to say, convertible from culture to culture by those who possessed the necessary knowledge. Today cosmopolitanism is a given from which we start, not the ideal of an élite. My view is that the study of literature has the same vocation that it has had from the moment literature – or poetry, as they used to say – became aware of itself as such; but that today and to-morrow that self-awareness must take into account both an unprecedented degree of fragmentation

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and diversity among cultures, of integration of each literature within its cultural system or polysystem, the absolute interdependence of cultures and literatures among themselves, even and especially when they are politically opposed, and the consequent intellectual and aesthetic tension. Plurality, difference, otherness are the key words that could be used to describe what has happened to the field and has seemingly foiled (at least until we relearn to consider in-depth inductive study as another kind of scientificity) all attempts at defining homogeneous and easily definable series. In my view the most crystal-clear formulation of this state of affairs is to be found in Tzvetan Todorov’s conclusion to his Theory of Symbols (1979); since then, he has continued to probe cultural diversity. Romanticism, confirmed by Von Humboldt’s considerations upon diversity in the construction of human languages (1835), “replaced generality by diversity, identity by difference” (Todorov, 353; my translation). Focus on imitation is replaced by focus on production because, instead of trying to retrieve a stable and irreplaceable essence, creators will concentrate on the irreducible difference between and among individual phenomena, on self-expression that asserts the bond between producing and the product rather than upon the coherence of the world. The diversity of languages, in turn tied to that of nations, is to be extolled rather than regretted (in contrast to the attitude of a Renaissance humanist like du Bellay, who saw Babelism as the consequence of original sin). Humboldt sees a particular vision of the world residing in every language (vii:60; quoted in Todorov, 354). Diachronically, periods are as particular and as irreducible as languages are synchronically (remember, for example, F. Schlegel’s identifications of periods with dominant genres). Rather than exemplifying eternal principles, historical events unfold irreversibly (see Herder, Vico, Hegel). Poetic perfection lay in classical Greece, that is, in a past Golden Age. In contrast, the concept of originality is also a Romantic invention. Again, classical and Neoclassical rhetoric saw one norm, and deviations from it that were desirable but dangerous. And here is a most significant statement hailing a new synthesis, a new way of looking at the relationship between the universal and the particular, which, in contrast to Romanticism, no longer sees each work as generating its own aesthetic code. “Today I believe,” Todorov says, “in a plurality of norms and discourses […] Every society, every culture possesses a set of discourses from which a typology can be formed” (358). This opens the way not only to studying each type of discourse as discourse in relation to all others within a culture, but also to studying relationships among typologies, from one culture to another. Linguistic and artistic forms can be both transitive – i.e., broadly speaking utilitar-

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ian – and intransitive – i.e., broadly speaking self-sustaining and selfjustifying – and each culture generates its own hierarchies among these principles. With respect to symbolical expression, the symbol can be, romantically, more than a sign, or classically, as in St Augustine, just a different kind of sign. All this, in summary, is an encouragement to recognize otherness and to describe it for its own sake rather than always to oppose it to the same (here, then, we depart from mere contrast and mere binary comparison). What this means is that there is value in both one and the other, in cultures and their varied manifestations, not despite but by dint of their otherness. This Todorov calls heterology, discourse about the other. It is consciously postmodern and inherently dialogical because widely differing phenomena can, in this perspective, have a comparable level of value. There have been other formulations of such perspectives; I quote Todorov because of the clarity and (deceptive) simplicity of his statement, and because it is the kind of vision of our episteme which, among other things, accounts for the present and future opportunities open to literature and to the study of it within comparative literature. The global village is rife not only with national literatures that stubbornly continue to claim primacy but with regionalisms, ethnicities, literatures within literatures, all of which lay claim to immediate reality and to their share of the universal. Now the comparatist discourse of yesteryear was characterized by a certain number of simplifications, one of which was the concept of national literatures and their commonalities. It was the interplay of resemblances and differences that made the field comparative; the commonalities were emphasized, and they reassuringly seemed to illustrate the unity of the human phenomenon. It took us a long time to understand that unless we were sufficiently self-critical they would only illustrate the Western phenomenon ad infinitum but not even all of it: a cluster of supposedly major literatures in a few supposedly major languages. Among other scholars, Wlad Godzich has analysed how the (seemingly innocent) way in which Western literary studies have established themselves as an academic discourse with its field, objects, methods, and implicit conceptual framework worked so as to marginalize automatically what lay outside that framework, or at least ascribe to it a less essential function. “It is my claim that it is precisely this hegemonic monumentalizing view of literature which is challenged by emergent literatures. Emergent literatures are not to be understood then as literatures that are in a state of development that is somehow inferior to that of fully developed or ‘emerged’ literatures but rather [to be] those literatures that cannot be readily comprehended within the

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hegemonic view of literature that has been dominant within our discipline” (Godzich, 35). There is an obvious parallel here with earlier theories of development of Third World countries that implied – and often still do – an evolutionary concept of where they start and where they must arrive, whether or not this takes into account the endogenous needs of their culture, civilization, economy. Godzich proposes the expression “emergent” rather “emerging” literatures so as to emphasize that with the former expression the field and object are not stratified in favour of the already emerged. This criticism is no longer merely directed at the so-called West and its “orientalist” treatment of the East, its treatment of the literatures of lesser diffusion in Europe as less “great” or exemplary, its treatment of the “peripheral” literatures of the major languages as minor to the major literatures in those languages, and its treatment of the literatures of ethnic minorities in countries with major literatures; implicitly it may well be directed at major Eastern literatures for also potentially restraining emergent phenomena through their own codified traditions. By way of example we might think of the popular poets (such as Kim Ji Ha or more radically Pak No Heh) in present-day Korean poetry who, although they do not challenge the Chinese forms they have learned and still respect, successfully use Korean terms and images that will also bring the language and the life of common people closer to poetry; and indirectly express political realities by means of the accustomed natural themes and prosodic forms. Faced with an explosion of cultural aspirations throughout the world, comparative literature needs to assume forcefully that the universal is already (and has been all along, in often unanalysed ways) at work in all literatures; that we are right in the middle of the global village, and that not only do all literatures already belong – that has long been the assumption of the allied field called world literature – but none of them intrinsically possesses the supreme key to a hierarchy of formal or ideational values entitling them to discriminate in authoritative ways among or within themselves and among cultures. Is this something new? Surely the idea of a world citizenship of literatures and cultures at large is an old one, and it is because of its age and seeming acceptability that we have not drawn from it some of its most important consequences. The superficial cosmopolitanism of a certain comparatist discourse has made it seem easy to include rather than exclude, to compare on the basis of resemblances that bring out differences but reassure us that they are not ultimate differences, and above all to impose organizing structures that often go unanalysed. However, as soon as they do happen to be critically analysed, they reveal a pattern of possession and dispossession. One example of this

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oversimplification of the field at the expense of the complexity and diversity of the global village is the sclerosis that has overtaken the concept of national literatures. Unless it is possible to believe that comparative literature somehow orchestrates the study of a multiplicity of neatly defined literatures each of which manages to thrive in symbiosis with a language and to coincide with the borders of a nation-state, we are unduly imposing a very narrow pattern on the field and denying the realities of the global village, in which ethnic variety within the borders of nation-states is the rule rather than the exception, in which works written in exile often override in quality and relevance works written inside the country with the stamp of approval of the current regime – not to mention the fact that numerous literatures are still, after decolonization, linked by a common language but scattered around the globe (francophone literatures, Commonwealth literatures, Hispanic literatures, and so on). It is therefore more and more difficult to distinguish the local from the universal; and I am saying that instead of considering these seeming inconsistencies to be accidents, we should seize them as opportunities in our search for those relationships that will reveal and bring into relief cultural identities and relationships among them. This will help to avoid, for example, a treatment of nonEuropean literatures in European languages with evolutionary categories that place the norm in the literature considered as more ancient and more major, so that, say, the poetry of Québec in the nineteenth century is supposed to undergo in quick succession a Romanticism, a Parnassian art for art’s sake movement, and a Symbolism. This does not mean that the very fact that a non-European literature is written in a European language makes it ipso facto a colonized literature. Such works as the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or Cameroonian novelist Mongo Beti’s Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba show the extent to which a European language can be used to bring to light the overwhelming specificity of the non-European culture that is characterized in it. Achebe intersperses his prose with Ibo terms, but these only underscore the poetic use of the English language in describing the beauty and the spiritual meaning of Ibo customs as they come face to face with the missionaries’ claim to moral superiority. Just so, Mongo Beti in his novel is able to curb the French language with its ironies into the service of a black aesthetics. Thus, as I stated at the outset, the relationship between, on the one hand, the particular, the regional, the local, and the at least seemingly isolated and, on the other, the universal not only needs rebalancing but has already been rebalanced. Comparative literature has been overtaken by the claim of an extraordinary number and variety of cultures to the structuring and the knowledge of their own identity. The

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centre of this human universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Does this mean that we can only revert to the study of individual literatures and cultures as monads unrelated to one another? That is certainly not what I am implying. I do advocate the use of descriptive methods such as those of the polysystem approach, which seem the most comprehensive, to arrive at an understanding of the internal dynamics of cultures and of the manner in which they develop a collective self and thereby a perception and representation of the Other; and these methods, whether they draw their objects from temporal succession or from coexistence in space, or in a combination of space and time, from kinships of formal models, will have to be increasingly concrete and inductive, that is, attentive to the qualities of their particular materials. Thus, respect for diversity and for the differentials of specific objects will be built into the methodology. I do not expect this diversity to result in disorder and lack of system but in quite disciplined inquiries into the manner in which symbolic objects, particularly literary works, serve as icons of their cultures – that is, represent first of all to the consciousness of a given social entity, be it a whole nation, an ethnic minority, or a grouping of nations, its symbolic self, and also represent it to other collective entities. What is mutual here is the symbolical function of literature, and in general of art. The literary studies and particularly comparative studies of tomorrow have an extraordinary responsibility in rediscovering that symbolical function, and its working within and among cultures. Identity operates by identification, which is a kind of bonding and explains why groups and members of groups feel so strongly about certain formal features of cultural artefacts relating to their self-expression, to the formation of their collective personalities, and to the individual’s identity and difference with respect to those collective personalities. This does not mean that the literary text as symbol is the most directly and easily understood: a formalization sets in, a distance; an indirectness lends to the formalized utterance greater dignity and durability – that is, when literature sets out to “donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu”; but then again this symbolical entity becomes challenged and changed by new desires and expectations. Literary studies will continue to work at both poles, the already institutionalized and canonized, and that which comes to challenge the institution and the canon. I believe, however, that the emphasis will be less on the either/or (either popular or élitist) than on an improved understanding of the function of the literary object within the culture in either case. “Poetry” says Northrop Frye, “speaks the totality of language, the language of the subconscious as well as the language of consciousness; the language of emotion as well as the language of intelligence. The units of this lan-

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guage, whether words or images or even letters, are symbolic in relation both to their own verbal context and to the external entities they represent.” More than ever, in our time literatures will embody this double aspect of human expression, the direct and the indirect, and the typology of literary texts will require an increasingly sensitive typology of approaches. My hope is that, in comparative literature, exclusiveness of approach will predominate only as a hypothetical tool, to be viewed in ultimate complementarity with other approaches against the backdrop of the ultimate common possession of all literatures: the value vested in the written word. In Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting the initial passage encapsulates an episode of history that belongs to everyman: how in the cold of a winter day Clementis caringly placed his hat on President Gottwald’s head, how the picture penetrated into every history textbook until Gottwald had Clementis hanged, after which Clementis disappeared from the textbooks and only his hat remained on Gottwald’s head. Kundera crafts this episode into a symbol by singling it out, by arming it with irony, by placing it at the beginning of his book, and thus exercises his responsibility as writer and guardian of the written word. We are told by Lyotard and others that in postmodernity knowledge is a power that translates itself in languages. It is important that the human sciences such as comparative literature keep this power in the service of humanity. To state this is not to practice wishful thinking derailed by sentiment but to emphasize a dimension that had been deemphasized in favour of greater scientificity but never abolished, all the less since scientificity itself holds human value. In their examination of symbolical systems, literary studies will be increasingly challenged to demonstrate their communicative functions and also the permanence of cultural specificities. The importance of these specificities will not diminish – far to the contrary – and that is why the commonality of possessing and preserving a culture, with the consequent need to interpret it to others, will remain a primary objective of literary studies everywhere. In short, my ambition for comparative literature studies is that they not be comparative because postmodern but postmodern – that is, generously pluralistic and respectful of others – because comparative.

works cited Godzich, Wlad. “Emergent Literatures and Comparative Literature.” Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, ed. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1988.

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Os Estudios Literarios entre ciência e hermeneutica. Proceedings of the First Congress of the Portuguese Comparative Literature Association. Lisbon 1991. Todorov, Tzvetan. Théorie du symbole. Paris: Le Seuil 1979.

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2 Is Comparative Literature Ready for the Twenty-first Century?

I confess to being haunted by the constant intellectual challenge of the changing nature of our field of knowledge. My title is meant to underscore that challenge rather than to exaggerate the importance of the turn of the century, useful only as a metaphor for possible continuities and discontinuities in the near future. As well, it is a risky attention-getting device, in that any generalization is a construct and can be suspected of trying to impose a common metanarrative on a community that may not even perceive itself as a community. I am dutifully wary of such pretensions; my thoughts are simply based on many years of sustained observation, and sporadic analysis, of the comparativist discourse. This leads me to imagining three possible attitudes with respect to the near future of comparative literature. The first would be strongly optimistic in its hopes for literary studies in the global village, improved possibilities of dialogue, more cogency and depth in the self-understanding and in the theoretical systematization of literary studies. The second, on the contrary, would be strongly pessimistic, envisaging a rapid decline of comparative literary studies as a cogent area

Inaugural address, Fourteenth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, Edmonton, 1994. Published in Comparative Literature Now: Theory and Practice / La Littérature comparée à l’heure actuelle: théories et réalisations, ed. S. Tötösy de Zepetnek, M. Dimi´c, and Irene Sywenky (Paris: Champion 1999), 129–39.

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of knowledge, a construction condemned qua construction because based upon uncritical notions of comparability, both epistemologically and programmatically. The third attitude would be a pragmatic one, accepting the extreme pluralism of the field, welcoming it, in fact, as an opportunity to counteract the artificiality and ultimate monologism of comparative literature envisaged as a kind of sophisticated international information highway. Strongly armed by a heterological approach against comparative literature as a purveyor of metafictions, this attitude would look beyond institutionalized definitions and rigid programs towards a renewed commitment to cultural exploration, and, to that end, towards methodological innovation; and, for individual scholars, towards a greater degree of personal independence and commitment to philosophical articulateness. It is the third attitude, the experimental, even existential one, that seems the most fruitful, as opposed to both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism, but it does presuppose a moment of disciplinary analysis of ourselves, and, once again, of self-disclosure. One of the weaknesses of comparative literature has been its anxiety over not always being situated “à la fine pointe de l’avant-garde,” where the action is thought to be. We welcomed the cross-fertilization with linguistics, psychoanalysis, and structural anthropology that occurred in the heyday of structuralism; but many studies then bent the analysis of literary texts entirely to the criteria of one or more of these disciplines. At the same time, and ever since, something called literary theory, which (all other things being equal) should be deeply internal to our studies, began to be construed as just about their obverse, on the one hand by theoretically inclined comparatists dissatisfied with the epistemological imperfections of such pratices as positivistic literary history or naïve thematology; on the other by those who saw theory as an invading body, foreign to comparative literature. This in turn gave rise to the view that comparative literature was being displaced by that invader, as if theory were not the very process of ongoing critical examination and reshaping of the conditions of acquisition and construction of our knowledge; and to the impression that theory and its frontier proponents do not work in the field of comparative literature, whereas they possess a specialization that should be brought in to restructure comparative literature from the outside. Deconstruction and postmodernism have similarly gained territory as external agents, whereas both are ideally suited to be internalized by comparative literary studies; this is not a question of territoriality and ownership, but of the fundamental motives that structure what we teach and write. The development of cultural studies signals another reshaping of the disciplinary spectrum, and another round of risks and opportuni-

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ties: opportunities, as our studies have been immeasurably enriched by every one of the so-called invasions; risks, because of the tendency of comparative literature scholarship to submit to the various paradigms of these successive interlocutors too readily, too completely, still not critically enough. If you think of us, for a moment, as a scholarly community with a culture of its own, you can immediately envisage, as you would for culture X or Y, mechanisms of domination and liberation, inclusion and exclusion at play. The point here is that all too often, wavering over its own identity, comparative literature has given ground to this variety of solicitations. For the sake of the future investment of our intellectual resources it is crucial that we probe our own “cultural identity” and decide whether the dissolving tendency is to continue or whether we have grounds yet again to assert a dynamic identity of our own within the plurality of disciplines. Even to refer to comparative literature as a discipline or set of disciplines arouses suspicions of hierarchical thinking and unanalysed undercover ideology; to speculate about a collective intellectual future implies a degree of predictability and therefore questionable epistemological self-assurance. In the “era of suspicion” there exist no simple, untainted verbal tools with which to communicate our findings to one another, so systemically determined are all our words and concepts. Intercultural dialogue, one of the themes of the 1985 Paris congress, has been slow in progressing from its dream status to solid reality. In many ways we have had continuously before us a tabula rasa. Is it not time to rally around our many commonalities, which lie in questioning and problematizing rather than in defending certain answers? To agree on a set of problematics, recognizing them as problematics? A research field, in other words, free of predetermined conclusions, and an open system allowing for modifications? I do not doubt that there is consensus on the object of our inquiry, which is literary; but even the specificity of literature within culture, and the mode(s) of approach to the literary text, as well as the very identity of that literary text, are grounds for discussion rather than tenets of a common faith. The process of intellectual change in our time appears to be guiding us towards ever new encounters with other fields of knowledge (cultural theory on the one hand, epistemology of science on the other, unless you go as far as somehow linking them together). Let us not equate literary studies with the study of the entire cultural universe, but let us ever be mindful of their living interdependence. That comparative literature has always been a misnomer is certainly no secret; but the reasons for its mistaken identity need once and for all to be brought to light and remedied. Assuredly one of these is the identification of literatures with nationhoods or even political statehoods

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normally associated with a single language. Comparative literature as a study of commonalities and differences arose from that identification, and let us face it: it suited well the mental habits of a number of university systems in which the literature of their nation in their language represented the familiar, the culturally safe and compatible. It also confirmed conscious or unconscious nationalisms at stages in the development of national cultures when these cultures needed to look within themselves. Such a statement, however, carries within itself a risk of oversimplification, since it sounds as if nations and national literatures would eventually reach a point of greater maturity at which their selfinvolvement would cease, and minds could only then freely venture to make discoveries beyond national borders; and only then could internationality take over. One look at literary developments in the early modern period would suffice to document the fertility of cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, and transhistorical encounters during that epoch. It is not, then, the case that a phase of internationalism follows a phase of nationalism in literary studies; rather, both tendencies are co-present at every stage. What fetters them is the thought that to look towards the Other is somehow extraordinary, whereas the Other is already in us, and every text is a response to factors both exogenous and internal. The distinctive quality of comparative literature studies in this regard is indeed their emphasis on internationality; but internationality in the sense of crossing linguistic fields and national borders is not, if it ever has been, the sole criterion. Inasmuch as studies of intertextuality and of the workings of polysystems help us to understand how much interaction occurs in the genesis, formation, and subsequent trajectory of any literary work, and we are thus led to grasp the systemic aspect of all literary phenomena, we can easily see that literature qua literature is intercultural regardless of whether the exogenous elements in a given corpus hail from a different culture or not. Literatures exist together as system. In the structuring of curricula, research topics, or even institutional groupings such as departments, institutes, and programs, lines of division are necessary. If they claim to be comparative, they should focus on languages, literatures, and cultures in contact rather than on any one of them in isolation. What comparative literature as an intellectual pursuit, regardless of institutional barriers, has to offer is far more than a history of what these literatures have received and given and what processes of transformation they have undergone; it also develops an organic understanding of these processes. At this point we must evoke the perceived problem of hierarchies: the reproach often directed towards comparative literature is that in its systematizing it has been creating, at least implicitly, scales of values

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the higher of which are often situated in a past, or in an elsewhere. In my view this danger by no means automatically vitiates the examination of literary interactions; it places upon each scholar the burden of problematizing in such a way that the search for universals does not become the search for his or her own universals. This is a challenge in particular to our so-called East-West studies, where gradually Western scholars have learned the limitations of one-way, eurocentric influence studies. The question is how to structure, an inquiry without imposing, let us say, a given concept of poetics; and, philosophically, whether or not the concept of poetics itself harbours unexamined presuppositions on which no consensus has been reached. Yet as long as there has been poetry and wherever and whenever there has been poetry, there have also been reflection upon it, and comparison among different approaches to and conclusions from that reflection. A combination of problematizing rather than asserting and of inductive approaches would go a long way towards keeping the ghost of any dominancy away from comparative poetics. This in turn entails a willing acceptance of pluralism, not only in the phenomena studied, but also in the self-image of comparative literature. We are, and will be, bearing the marks of postmodernity. My saying this does not imply lip service to postmodernism as an aesthetic, which provides a substantial field of study in itself as well as a pervasive and challenging model for instant interdiscursivity in the making. It is simply the acceptance of the era in which we live and brings in the conditions to which our discourse responds. It forces upon us both the solitude and the togetherness of all cultural identities in the global village and of their fragmentation and internal interactions; and we cannot forget that cultural identities are not linked by ethnicity and/or language alone but may be linked with or be perceived as linked with factors of race, gender, social status. It imposes in the most acute way the presence of the Other not only in society but as part and parcel of the self. It roots us in history once again; it destabilizes élitism; it rejects and mocks all metanarratives. How, then, in this ambience, do we legitimate the pursuit of an order? Such a legitimation is not difficult as long as the emphasis is on the pursuit of intelligibility rather than the imposition of an abstract order. Just as the postmodern artist, according to Lyotard, invents his aesthetic post facto, so the literary scholar can set aside, in the initial stages of his or her research at least, pre-established axiologies and let that which is inventoried guide the inventory, and schemata remain instrumental. Such, for example, are historical schemata. Postmodernity likes to treat them ironically, which opens the way – if one wishes – to transhistorical reappropriations and new ways to translate diachronic into synchronic configurations.

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Another pervasive aspect of postmodernity that is likely to remain with us, is the dialectic of the margin and the centre, whereby the marginal tends to move towards the centre and the central towards the margin. This has certainly been noticeable in the comparatist discourse – for example, in the ongoing redefinition of what is literature and what is not, which in successive waves focuses attention upon areas previously considered extraliterary and relegates to the margin the already familiar and canonized. But the interplay of centre and margin is not only a question of corpus; as well it is a question of voice – who speaks, and how, in a known corpus or in a newly explored one. For a variety of reasons and in a variety of settings we are led to seek out voices previously silenced or neglected and to reinterpret texts in the light of such discoveries. This is why feminism and postcolonialism are far from being strange bedfellows vis-à-vis each other and postmodernism, and why the canon demands constant revision. Scholars need not submit to the new trends around them as if they were absolute imperatives (imposed by whom? after all, the very idea is to turn away quietly from all imperatives!); yet they might be wise to deepen their awareness of them so as to retain their freedom of choice, recognize institutional pressures as well as the winds of fashion for what they are, and go with, or perhaps against the trend clearsightedly. Here I seem to suggest that there are ethical issues involved in our theoretical and methodological stances, that it is sometimes ethically necessary for the comparatist thinker to go against the stream but sometimes to go with the stream, for equivalent reasons of conscience. Indeed, I believe there is a link between theoretical thought and ethics. Theoreticians certainly have not been massively affirming such linkages, yet one can detect in some recent theoretical writings a more than passing interest in relationships between theoretical choices and ethical responsibility towards the text and its interpretation, towards the audience, towards the critical and theoretical activity in society. Indeed, poststructuralist thinkers are beginning to point out that implicitly the ethical concern has been there all along inasmuch as even their denials had greater human understanding as their ultimate goal. Hillis Miller announces “a focus on the question of the ethical moment in writing or narrating novels, acting as a character within them, reading novels, writing about them” (8). In the ethical moment “there is a claim made on the author writing the work, on the narrator telling the story within the fiction of the novel, on the characters within the story at decisive moments of their lives, and on the reader, teacher or critic responding to the work. This ethical ‘I must’ cannot […] be accounted for by the social and historical forces that impinge upon it […] The ethical moment, in all four of its dimensions, is genuinely

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productive and inaugural in its effects on history” (Miller, 8–9). Tobin Siebers in The Ethics of Criticism explores the way in which particular schools of criticism seek to justify ethically their theoretical choices and the way in which these choices contribute to a definition of ethical thought. And again, Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction treats as a matter of ethics the way in which we articulate our response to literary texts so that our responses inform, in turn, our theorizing and teaching. This emphasis is not the mere result of a swing of the pendulum, nor does it exactly come as a surprise. It is a timely reminder that even the heaviest emphasis, let us say the formalism and consequent impersonality that were inherent in New Criticism, did not exclude, on the part of the critical thinker, a complementary ethical concern that was not formulated in earlier works but became formulated later. Again, the thought of Northrop Frye appeared at first to disengage literary texts and the study of them from what he calls the myths of concern – that is, established religious and moral ideologies, which in his view can only generate repetitive, uninteresting literature; against and within it there arise myths of freedom that generate liberated views of reality. Literature as portrayed in the Anatomy of Criticism is anything but a tool of ethics; yet in the perspective of Frye’s whole thought they are allies. The point concerning the ethical linkages of theoretical stances does not, however, extend only to thinkers who in their alternative writings specifically attract our attention to the ethical dimension of theoretical choices. It extends even more to those whose ethical engagement is implicit and is there for us to perceive, although it will not say its name because, if it did it, it would rejoin the very humanism that much of contemporary theory has contested. It is an ethical engagement that coincides with the exercise of intellectual responsibility, that requires the scholar as subject either to adopt the stance that is proposed or to dissent from it. From the disarticulation of all philosophical, moral, and aesthetic hierarchies there arises the necessity for scholars to chart their course, to situate themselves vis-à-vis a number of alterities, and alterity in general. In particular there is little sense in looking for a specific function for comparative literature if we have not decided that, in ways that may vary widely according to individuals and collectives, literature calls upon us to examine visions of the world as means of communication within cultures and among cultures. It is our mode of response to this call that I regard as an ethical matter, because it pertains to the exercise of our social responsibility as individuals. Saying this implies, in turn, attention to the subject, so problematic in the eyes of postmodernism, and thus to the self. The status of the subject is of the essence in countless ways. For example, in theory of

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history it has been recognized for a long time that the historian’s self is greatly involved in the writing of history, and that history is a construct. This statement of course has to be modified where quantitative methods are used; but even they, in the end, are instrumental to a historian’s interpretation of the past. As for theoretical thought, it is steeped in history much more than many of its exponents like to admit. The recent evolution of Julia Kristeva provides an example of the importance of historical self-knowledge on the theoretician’s part. From a cognitive viewpoint the personal source of a theory may be of no importance. Yet theoretical stances are responses by and investments of selves in historical situations, and so for ourselves as teachers, authors, and communicators, as well as for those whose thought we communicate and discuss, their historicity is significant. Voices speaking in and for comparative literature also have their own historicity, which needs both attention and self-analysis so that they will not merely be relaying voices from neighbouring disciplines but be heard for their own sake. Without this audibility in comparative literature writings of the future qua comparative literature writings, the dissolution I mentioned earlier as the worst-case scenario will be even closer because our best exponents will have invested their subjective and ethical commitment elsewhere in the spectrum of knowledge. But what is that specificity of comparative literature, and to what degree is it viable? When I call for a typology of comparative literature studies, typology in the classificatory sense usual in the human sciences, it is in reaction against the prevalent tendency to dichotomize (and thereby simplify), to opt for one side only (e.g., “history” or “theory,” as the choice appeared to be not so long ago). A typology recognizes the existing pluralism of the field without renouncing a pragmatic ordering and strict criteria. It is by definition inclusive; it would recognize the comparatist discourse as a critical discourse of our time among other discourses, not exempt, therefore, from the characteristics of contemporary discourse. The concept of typology itself constitutes an alternative to classifications of discourse that imply a priori centres, hierarchies, preestablished models. It calls at the outset for inductive research into literary relationships within a given culture set in a given socio-historical situation, and from there into relationships among literatures of comparable cultures existing under similar conditions, without positing a preconceived unity. But this can occur in several ways, and one can envisage a typology of comparative typologies. It could follow Claudio Guillén’s concept of three kinds of “supranacionalidad” (93): international literary relations that can be studied genetically, those that can be based on social and economic conditions, and those established on theoretical

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grounds; to the latter I would add other groupings, founded on formal kinships or on semiotic models. Indeed, José Lambert once advocated a map of comparative studies, a concept implying a virtual order based on inclusiveness rather than on one kind of “supranacionalidad” only. From a pedagogical viewpoint, and in our endeavours to construct renewed literary histories (and perhaps, more importantly, to gain a historical understanding of the dialogue of alterities through literature), comparative literature still comes across as a set of approaches to literature liberated by its potential for combining the study of difference with the quest for human universals. This very freedom makes it difficult to produce new textbooks in a discipline that lives by reformulating itself: few dare to encapsulate a plan of study that could be proposed to classrooms internationally, even if its goals were typological rather than hierarchical. Of course, the ideal book or curriculum would stress, along with the international, interlinguistic, and intercultural nature of comparative literature studies, the function of literature within culture. In Théorie littéraire: problèmes et perspectives (1989) a serious attempt was made to combine approaches to the problem of literature within culture, beginning with the formation of literature within culture; to preclude both élitism and populism; to avoid isolating literature from other human activities but equally to avoid representing it as completely immersed in other forms of discourse. It has been said many times: specificity is not autonomy, no one advocates autonomy, but, unless specificity is the case, literary studies may as well be absorbed in cultural studies. I attribute specificity to literature, which implies belief in a continuing and in fact an enhanced role for literary studies once the processual nature of literature is taken into account. In the Proceedings of the xith icla Congress Lubomír Dole3el reminded us that the fictionality of “possible worlds” vested in literary works bears witness first of all to their specific existence in human imagination, but also to the fact that as the imagination tracks relationships between the fictional and the real world, human lives are enriched by the fictionality of possible worlds. We cling to our narratives; their iconicity is part of our culture and of our individual selves. Consequently, possible worlds can be mutually studied throughout the global village so that every possible world potentially belongs to every inhabitant of the global village. In the world of today a whole aesthetic dialogue is in the process of being learned because the number of cultural identities to be explored is increasing as political empires become fragmented by the cultural aspirations of more and more groups; also because scholars across the board are learning to divest themselves of hierarchical mental habits. But specificity cannot be solely based upon formalist grounds; if it is

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warranted at all it must also be validated by hermeneutic means, by reception studies, and last but certainly not least by relational studies linking literary and cultural phenomena. Jean Bessière has beautifully described the dual citizenship of the literary work: À partir de l’oeuvre, suivant l’interrogativité de cette affirmation que l’oeuvre fait dans son apparence, il peut être dit qu’il y a quelque savoir, que les choses sont, sans qu’il soit conclu que l’oeuvre donne quelque savoir, qu’elle soit avec les choses ou qu’elle donne les choses, ou qu’elle soit, par son arbitraire, la négation inévitable du savoir, du réel. L’interruption que fait l’écriture quelconque dans les discours se réiinterprète: elle est ce moment, cet exercice de transgression des discours tant qu’ils sont leur propre identité. De la même manière, l’élaboration calculée de l’oeuvre est le moment et le moyen, dans l’identité d’une forme, de la transgression des identités du savoir, du réel, suivant la quaestio. La nouveauté de l’oeuvre est cela même, et secondairement son éventuelle innovation formelle. (225)

Or more aphoristically, in the words of Mario Valdés: “Truth in literature does not depend on verification, even where it is possible” (156). Thus, it would not be an exaggerated claim to state that literature fulfils comparable sets of functions in all cultures, although this fulfilment follows different patterns at earlier stages of societies in the passage from myth to poetry, from orality to writing than in later, modern societies. Nor are these differences solely chronological, as Brian Stock shows in his study of the relationship between written and oral texts and of the formation of textual communities. The comparative studies of tomorrrow have an extraordinary responsibility in rediscovering the symbolical function of literature within culture and its working within and among cultures. Identity operates by identification, a kind of bonding, which explains why groups and members of groups feel so strongly about formal features of cultural artefacts relating to their self-expression, to the formation of their collective personalities, and to the individual’s problematic relationship with such collective personalities. This does not mean that the symbolic function of the literary text is simple to understand and to describe. A distance tends to set in, lending to the formalized, “marked” utterance greater dignity and durability – apt to “donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.” Potentially, all literatures of the world can be studied in this way, though such factors as the lesser diffusion of a number of languages are obstacles. I believe it, however, to be a matter of consensus that the corpus of comparative literature is the entire system of literatures of the world. Access does not rest on the inventory of texts alone; it also

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depends on the mode of presentation and analysis of texts. This is where comparative literature can demonstrate the need for and the benefits of heterological attitudes. In the future the survival but also the validity of comparative literature studies will depend on our ability to serve all cultures in ways that will ensure and enhance their membership in the world system of literatures. The nuance of cautious optimism with which I began consists in thinking that our hesitancies about truth-claims in literary studies can be reversed, on the grounds, for example, of Gianni Vattimo’s faith in poetry to survive and surpass philosophy in the quest for truth. If at least some of these points about the continued internationality and interculturalness of comparative literature, and about the continued pertinence of the concept of literature, were matters of consensus, then we could also remain confident about its aspirations to theoretical validity and social relevance, and it could be said that comparative literature is ready for the twenty-first century, whether or not the twenty-first century is ready for comparative literature.

works cited Angenot, Marc, Jean Bessière, Douwe Fokkema, and Eva Kushner, eds. Théorie littéraire: problèmes et perspectives. Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1989. Bessière, Jean. Énigmaticité de la littérature. Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1993. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press 1988. Guillén, Claudio. Entre lo uno y lo diverso. Barcelona: Editorial crítica 1985. Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia University Press 1987. Stock, Brian. Listening to the Text. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990. Valdés, Mario. World-Making: The Literary Truth-Claim and the Interpretation of Texts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1992.

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3 Towards a Typology of Comparative Literature Studies

It would be absurdly ambitious even to attempt to give a brief survey of the map of existing approaches in comparative literature. I merely wish to voice the need for such a map, and to indicate why I consider that it should be of a typological nature if comparative literature is truly to fulfil its international calling. This simply means taking one programmatic step in the direction in which the present diversity of our field is taking us, and stating what groupings and alliances, new and old, some expected, some unexpected, emerge as the most obvious from that initial vantage point. In our era comparative literature as an academic discourse linked to a body of knowledge will legitimately and proudly reflect the diversity of its object, which is the literature of the world. I have argued that literature in the global village offers the observer an unprecedent array of aesthetic and cultural models, all of which claim not only legitimacy but access to the universal through their very specificity. By and large the process of renewal of literature has proceeded along one of two obverse yet intimately linked paths, either adhering to a model situated in a prestigious past and giving rise to a tradition, or challenging – or, as Jauss puts it, provoking – that tradition, breaking the norm. In both cases, however, the writer and the reader are

Paper read at the Thirteenth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, Tokyo, 1991. Published in The Force of Vision 3. Literary Theory, ed. W. Van Peer and Elrud Ibsch (Tokyo 1995), 502–10.

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placed in an either or situation. In France towards the end of the seventeenth century there occurred a “querelle des anciens et des modernes” in which writers passionately opted for one stance or another. In the case of present-day Japanese novelists it would appear that choices are surfacing between portrayal of conflict, which might be the more modern way, and denial of conflict, which might be more traditional, particularly between adherence to the foundational importance of family relationships and a more “Western” acceptance of individuation and education by breaking completely with one’s past. Aesthetic renewals and their affective and societal correlatives seem mainly to work – or at least to be perceived to work – by antitheses. This kind of either/or approach implies among other things that there is and should be a dominant aesthetic, genre, pattern at any given time in any linguistic/cultural area. This in turn gives rise to opposition on the part of that which happens to be suppressed by this dominance. But the dominance is by nature unstable, harbouring within itself or fielding from outside the seeds of new oppositions; the triumph of postcolonial over colonial voices often opens the way to a new aesthetic equilibrium, for example. Thus, if we consider the postmodern world at large we witness the hugest deregulation phenomenon ever and a new opportunity; as cultures assert themselves, plumb the depths of their identity, and rejoice in it, there arises by the same token a potential for greater understanding of the specificity, and aspiration to identity, of other cultures. The very fact that repressive forces respond with violent energy to free intercultural communication bears witness to the inherent power of literature to induce dialogue. I would go further, and posit that literature is by nature dialogical and that our next task is to build that dialogicity into our theoretical and methodological stances. Comparative literature has always implicitly or explicitly assumed the right of all literatures to international attention – in other words, the belief that its field and object is no less than the international field of world literature – but it has not consistently practiced that assumption. It is therefore somewhat overtaken (with typical academic slowness to react) by the explosive diversification manifested in the field itself and its postmodern acceptance of the experiential, the diverse, the Other precisely inasmuch as it resists reduction and classification. The concept of typology itself signals an alternative to classifications of discourse that imply a priori centres, hierarchies, pre-established models. It calls at the outset for inductive research into literary relationships within a given culture set in a given socio-historical situation, and from there into relationships among comparable cultures existing under similar conditions, without positing a preconceived unity.

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In itself of course this is nothing new, and one could invoke Humboldt on specificity, or even the founding comparativist openness to ethnic realities characteristic of the groupe de Coppet at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But in that very foundation there lurks the expectation of progress from A to B, or what was then called perfectibility, which in the end will submerge the different, the divergent. In sharp contrast, the postmodern mentality shuns the showcasing of any evolutionary or developmental relationship. It greets the new creation as a new event, not as the expected next number in a new series. “A postmodern artist or writer,” says Lyotard, “is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done” (81). The use of the rules precedes their existence, and so the aesthetic generated by the work can only exist in the future anterior tense. We might remember here that some decades ago the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead characterized cognitive encounters between subject and object in their interrelationship as new events, each of which changes the world. Only post facto can we attempt to fit the new event, the new literary creation in this case, into our typology. Thus our object, the literature of the world, constantly surprises us by its capacity to bypass and outgrow any systematization as soon as it appears. Yet systematization is needed more than ever, not only because the diversity of the field is increasing but because the human sciences are challenged by the exact sciences to practise greater rigour in the information they communicate and teach. The practice of typology would embody a willingness to describe and compare without imposing hierarchies, applying that attitude not only to the corpus examined but to the portfolio of theories and methods. In other words, the comparatist discourse would be wise to accept that it, too, is called upon to revise its alternatives, its hierarchies, and its metadiscursive assumptions and share in the openness of the field by accepting itself as cultural practice relating to cultural specificities all aspiring to legitimation; and this will lead to improved scholarly dialogue as opposed to a situation in which we witness, from time to time, the displacement of one approach or theory by another with an exclusiveness that undermines the results of the former. In our desire for scientificity we have tended to imitate the search for recurrences characteristic of research in the exact sciences, and

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have in the process curbed what is more characteristic of the human sciences, the in-depth and even cumulative exploration of the particular that might lead to glimpses of the universal without abolishing that particular. In fact comparative literature, if viewed internationally, is characterized by the great diversity of its practices, despite the various monopolizing tendencies that too often have severely threatened local practices with becoming obsolete from an international viewpoint, precisely when they forget that they themselves are subject to obsolescence. This diversity closely relates to the manner in which literary studies are conceived and structured in various linguistic and cultural areas and communities, to the variety of relationships studied, and to divergent definitions of comparative literature. In no way am I saying that the recognition of cultural diversity among comparative literature approaches, and the use of non-hierarchical criteria, means that anything whatsoever will belong, or that scholarly judgment concerning inclusion and exclusion will be relinquished; I am saying that there will be many more partners in the consensusforming process. (We must recognize that even the welcome and very widely agreed-upon move towards the acceptance of cultural diversity as a base may become a hindrance if its political correctness turns into an end in itself and an excuse for refraining from the construction of new and well-systematized objects of study.) Furthermore, the term “typology” implies neither a new approach nor a fear to choose an approach but rather a tool for classification and comparison of examples in categories all recognized as legitimate. Typology also provides an opportunity and a hope: in the absence of a research system, of a data base that would inform us of all that is taught and researched in the world under the name of comparative literature, a typological ordering of what is known will give structure to the knowledge we have and the possibility of classifying and comparing new examples. As part of their introduction to comparative literature studies, many departments and programs teach the history of comparative literature, just as some departments of science teach history of science, to give students a perspective on the present definition, situation, and scope of the discipline. Some no longer teach the history of comparative literature because in their view it has become a kind of archaeology. Whether or not history of comparative literature is taught, but especially where it is not, the need arises to acquaint students and researchers with the constitution of the field if only to enable them to choose their own future emphases, and this is where a typological introduction might prove useful. But even where it is not codified in the form of a textbook or a course, the comparative literature scholar needs to

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have such a typology mentally available as a reference towards problematizing. It is part of the reflection upon one’s field of study, as well as of its legitimation. In the universities of many countries this requirement has taken the form of literary theory becoming a necessary part of comparative literature, responsible for providing any study, however detailed or general, with a conceptual framework. The “complete” comparative literature scholar needs not only to know the spectrum of theoretical frameworks at his disposal and to understand their compatibilities and incompatibilities, but also to know the options available in structuring the study of literary phenomena at the international level. It seems significant that fewer and fewer holistic textbooks of comparative literature have been appearing with the intent of spanning the field in some sense: among the last in date, François Jost’s textbook presented itself more as a philosophy of comparative literature than a map of comparative studies; Robert Clements’ book was practical and pedagogical; I would regard Ulrich Weisstein’s Theory of Comparative Literature and far more Brunel and Chevrel’s Précis de littérature comparée as having not only accepted but typologically articulated the diversity of comparative literature studies. Paradoxically, Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature, even as it began to look less and less fundamentally theoretical in the eyes of its critics, still served to cover internationally the families of problems belonging to comparative literature studies. It would be absurd not to recognize that, in the West at any rate, at any given time the typological inventory has tended to evolve with the current theoretical discussion. There are fashions in comparative literature. Thus as long and wherever the traditionally historical approach predominated, including source and influence studies, this predominance would show in theses defended, courses taught, articles and monographs published, congress proceedings. When and where more formal, more thematic, more structural approaches became paramount in literary studies, these changes of outlook communicated themselves to the comparative field. This also happened with the various types of studies dubbed “theoretical” rather than “comparative” that have impacted on literary studies separately or concurrently. The list is well known: theoretical insights coming from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology or linguistics; from sociocriticism, from discourse analysis, from semiotics; from feminist, poststructuralist, and deconstructive studies, to name only a few. It came as a shock to scholars who considered the internationality and more precisely the interlinguistic and interliterary nature of comparative studies as a necessary condition for their pursuit of universal-

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ity that literary theory had staked its validity on its understanding and construction of literary discourse whether in one or several languages. But we have to recognize that influential theoreticians have used examples from many languages and cultures – think, for example, of Bakhtin, Derrida, and Frye. With them the comparative aspect was implicit; it had a major impact on the comparative field by constructing problematics that cut across and cut deeper than the inventory and description of the interliterary process. The question arises whether comparative literature studies should abandon any holistic ambition of inventorying in space and time the literatures of the world in their mutual interrelationships, concentrating on a few exemplary areas where the imagination of one theoretician or several throws dazzling light upon the life and meaning of literature itself, as when aesthetic reception becomes part of the history of literature, when more generally it becomes impossible to speak of understanding literature without the participation of the reader, or when possible worlds assert their specific existence as a distinctive part of the human experience. Can we even predict future tendencies? Is it possible to point to preferred paths when we have just heard from every side how nonprescriptive our studies owe it to themselves to be in order to facilitate scholarly dialogue and enlarge its scope? Three examples can be given of types of study that in my view will continue to fulfil the mandate of comparative literature in an intercultural setting. The concept of a comparative history of literatures, which has undergone the same in-depth and even violent questioning as the concept of the history of a particular literature, and the historiography of it, appears to me to have emerged chastized but alive from this prolonged test – chastized in the sense that literary history knows itself to be construction and knows its relativeness and epistemological frailty. It offers itself, however, as the diachronic exploration of the rise and development of literatures in societies in various parts of the world, of the process whereby these literatures become aware of themselves as literatures and interact among themselves. The Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages series, sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, provides an illustration of the complexity, difficulty, and even danger of such an exercise; but at the very least it has demanded from its writers a fair coverage of less wellknown literatures, so that for an epoch, a movement, a geographic and/or cultural area, any dominance will be seen in perspective. It also demands a constant justification of what constitutes literature or how literary works arise amidst cultures and become “canonized” and “decanonized,” a process requiring constant awareness of the workings of polysystems. It includes the study of genres and of the manner in

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which they manifest pragmatic tendencies and cultural specificities. When Mineke Schipper tells us about African proverbs and sayings on women, or when Marisa Bortolussi writes on tales for children, they do not restrict the field of literary genres that have established themselves as literary genres; they widen theoretical as well as historical reflection to genres that have imposed themselves primarily through other functions than the poetic, though they may not be devoid of it. Should the kind of interliterary systematization that characterizes the Comparative History be applied to non-European groups of literatures, such as the East Asian? Inasmuch as it serves a useful function in the area of European languages and literatures by enriching and structuring our knowledge of the whole network of their relationships, I would say that it is a desirable pursuit, and that we can hope to see more inter-Asiatic, inter–Latin American studies as well as inter-African studies not limited to literatures in European languages. For example, Shengen University now publishes a whole inter-Asiatic comparative series. Possibly, in the spirit of both polysystem studies and the kind of studies that the late Dioný3 *urisin carried out with the Bratislava group, the focus should be not on the complete inventory but rather on the nature of the intraliterary and interliterary process itself. Perhaps as well, more limited historical spans and geographical areas should be studied in greater depth, with concentration on families of literatures that have interacted and on the understanding of the dynamics of the interaction, including attention to the social, cultural, and historical roots of regional commonalities. While I agree with José Lambert’s call for a world map of literatures and share his hope for an unprecedented flourishing of information, I would also call for a patient construction of this information, making certain at every step that it takes into account specificities of civilization and culture, especially with respect to mechanisms that operate selections among exogenous elements; and that it carefully discriminates among seemingly related traits. Thirdly, we have studies that are based on the pursuit of knowledge of literature “as such” and of its aesthetics (rather than originating in the study of a literature within a culture as an example of it, or from the systematic interweaving of literary histories). Earl Miner’s Comparative Poetics argues for beginning with the knowledge of particular poetics as points of departure, gradually extending the reflection to identify those traits that characterize all poetics universally. In the history of literatures there are favoured moments on which poetics will be founded; that is why they have to be corrected for the purposes of differing cultures. However the very existence of poetics – in both East

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and West – points to the fact that concentration upon constants and variables in the form of literature, poetry especially, can be an exemplary entry into intercultural studies. In this spirit, for example, fictionality of “possible worlds” can be studied with or without reference to geographical and/or historical contiguity in the origins of the texts. But, as Lubomír Dole3el has reminded us, possible worlds in their very separateness engage the reader’s imagination in tracing relationships with the actual world. Our cultural icons are part of us, and comparative studies that concentrate on that iconicity are among those that give privileged access to the knowledge of human experience so that, last but not least, the diverse values of the entire global village are served by such studies in the most creative way: every “possible world”* potentially belongs to every inhabitant of the whole village. This aesthetic dialogue has to be learned; meanwhile, let us not confuse systematizing for purposes of exposition with claims of universal validity; in this manner, we shall have systems that will neither alienate nor threaten those to whom they appear uncomfortable.

* The tripartite typology suggested here may appear parallel, as I discovered after the original paper was given (Tokyo 1991), to Claudio Guillén’s concept of three kinds of “supranacionalidad”: international literary relations that can be studied genetically, those that can be based on comparable social and economic conditions, and those established on theoretical grounds. My concern here was not, however, to verify the internationality or supranationality of each project but, taking it for granted, to claim potential access to theoretical validity for each of these families of studies.

works cited Bortolussi, Marisa. Análisis teorético del cuento infantil. Alhambra 1985. Dole3el, Lubomír. “Fictional Reference: Mimesis and Possible Worlds.” in Towards a Theory of Comparative Literature, vol. 3 of Proceedings of the xith icla Congress. Bern: Peter Lang Verlag 1991. Lambert, José. “À la recherche des cartes mondiales des littératures.” In Semper aliquid novi: littérature comparée et littératures d’Afrique: mélanges offerts à Albert Gérard, ed. János Riesz and Alain Ricard. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag 1990. 110–21. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press 1983. Schipper, Mineke. Source of All Evil. Allison and Busby 1991.

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4 Literary Studies, Cultural Studies: The Case for a Cease-Fire

Admittedly, my title dramatizes the tension that has been observed for some time between “literary” and “cultural” studies. A state of tension is not necessarily negative, but it does signal a need for attention. In this case it requires that special thought be given to the present and future orientation of comparative literature studies since the outcome may have profound repercussions upon this field of endeavour, from both an intellectual and a professional viewpoint. One may legitimately wonder whether the very obvious recent growth of cultural studies is not mostly a us phenomenon. It is well known that, periodically, intellectual fashions will change in such a way that people who are not habitual observers of every new trend may feel either guilty or disadvantaged. Whether the impulse comes from Paris, Yale, Chapel Hill, or Birmingham, it quickly becomes institutionalized. Publications and academic programs try to incorporate the new tendency, often “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” Is the current appeal of cultural studies that kind of phenomenon? Also, is it radically new? Leaving aside, mostly, its institutional aspect, let us analyse its intellectual rationale as a set of alternatives. It is all too easy to be on the defensive (and therefore in a position of weakness) against what destabilizes us. Let us instead attempt to design a dialogue.

Guest lecture, University of New Brunswick, March 1995, and Louisiana State University, April 1997. Published in 1616, Annuario 1995 (Madrid 1997), 71–89.

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The humanities in recent years have appeared to be constantly legitimating themselves and seeking their optimal path, which makes them seem fragile and drives them to extremes in their endeavour to inscribe themselves among the most necessary areas of human knowledge and activity. In comparison, the popularity of cultural studies can be seen – among other things – as an example of successful selflegitimation. Semiotically and psychologically we are used to grasping situations in terms of opposites. Here is an example. For many years literary theory has been represented as the opposite of literary history, in a manner that emphasized the failings of traditional, positivistic literary history and rarely took into account the fact that literary history has been abundantly renewing itself in response to the theoretical and methodological questioning it encountered. But theory too has changed, and one expression of that change has been precisely to broaden its role vis-à-vis literary studies from its initial critical stance towards literary history to the role of theoria, theorizing in a much more philosophical sense about literature within culture; and thus theory itself has become far more conscious of its own historicity, of the diversity and dispersion of the phenomena to be studied and of their access to signification – more conscious, therefore, of the need to accept the provisional, the fragmentary, the incomplete for reasons that are themselves theoretical. Thus the opposition between history and theory is seen in perspective as a kind of necessary accident in the humanities’ search for self-understanding; in the process it became clear, especially as structuralism gave way to poststructuralism, that what theoreticians had criticized was not just a mode of reconstruction of the past but all construction referring back to some kind of foundational vision. (For example, scholars engaged in Renaissance studies saw the extent to which the very concept of Renaissance has been a construct, and realized that at the very least it had to be recognized as such, which in turn became a basis for rethinking, rewriting, and rereading what can now be less dogmatically termed the early modern period with a view to perceiving the voices and the forces that the dominant construct had not made audible and visible.) Thus, not only has the history/theory opposition been breaking down, but it appears that overcoming it has been the fruit of new thinking about literature itself and therefore, necessarily, literature in relation to culture (whether or not in terms of a specificity of literature within culture). I therefore see the advent of the new opposition, that between literary and cultural studies, as a result of the breaking down of the earlier opposition, but also very much as an opportunity for improving the self-definition of comparative literature studies.

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Is the opposition between literary and cultural studies truly a new one? It seems to me on the contrary that it has been on our horizon for a very long time but has only recently been thrown into the arena of burning issues and represented as a bottom-line choice, so that where there were two different, complementary mentalities (complementary among groups but surely also within the thought and research of single individuals), attitudes have hardened, and hard choices are demanded between a concept of literature defined by specifically aesthetic criteria and a literary discourse seen as part of the social discourse at large, regardless of formal criteria and inseparably from the entire set of socio-cultural phenomena including mass phenomena. Furthermore, that opposition masks another, profoundly anchored in postmodernity: that between a perceived or voluntary élitism and a broad welcoming of all that enters into a culture, or into culture in general. For comparative literature there are, therefore, many issues involved, of which some are clearly institutional and have serious shortterm consequences in institutional and curricular terms, especially in the humanities if a choice is imposed between a strict definition of literature and a broadly cultural approach; and some are more philosophical, in the sense that they invite us to a prior examination of concepts before we draw any institutional and pedagogical consequences. American scholars working in comparative literature are very attentive to this conceptual aspect but are also faced with audiences that demand quick curricular and institutional implementation. In basic terms, the question arises whether, in American universities, literary studies programs are being superseded by cultural studies programs. The Canadian situation is slightly different: in Canada there are few programs and departments of comparative literature as such, which have by and large developed orientations independent of the American situation; yet undeniably the pressure is mounting, exemplified by the long lists of works on cultural theory and its applications periodically issued by academic presses. Even supposing the problem were only a storm in the American teapot, it would be incumbent on comparative literature scholars in other countries to reflect upon it, not by way of submission to some kind of perceived hegemony but in recognition of the fact that so much sifting of international intellectual trends has occurred in the us in the past few decades. Any generalization about tendencies in such a vast and diverse country runs the risk of being arbitrary and superficial. We may, however, rely on a document stemming from the American Comparative Literature Association, which reflects a discussion applicable to literary stud-

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ies in general, “A Report to the acla: Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century.” The document should be seen in its context, that of the periodic reporting on standards undertaken by the association. Earlier reports (1965 and 1976) portray comparative literature in the us as it has become familiar through the teaching and research of the faculty members now in place; the new report points to a profound destabilization of the discipline. From my own perspective there is nothing negative about being epistemologically destabilized; it is an opportunity to rethink current paradigms and the nature of openness. Has comparative literature been merely open-ended? or capable of generating truly open systems? The two previous reports, to which this report reacts, were grounded in a concept of comparative literary studies reinforcing “an identification of nation states as imagined communities with national languages as their natural bases” (Bernheimer, 1) and giving an elite image of the discipline that included work on texts in original languages (but often a set of dominant languages, with the languages of more remote cultures communicated only in translation). The earlier reports also expressed diffidence towards interdisciplinarity and even towards theory, both of which had been challenging the specificity or, as the authors of these reports would express it, the purity of comparative literary studies. It is not surprising that the authors of the newest report have proceeded to a radical examination of actually existing practices across the board. This in itself is a significant shift, because the very concept of standards regulating a discipline, which implies normativity, has given way to the observance of actual practices. In summary, the result of the inquiry is that “the space of comparison today involves comparisons between artistic productions usually studied by different disciplines; between Western cultural traditions, both high and popular, and those of non-Western cultures; between the pre-and post-contact cultural productions of colonized peoples; between gender constructions defined as feminine and those defined as masculine; or between sexual orientations defined as straight and those defined as gay; between racial and ethnic modes of signifying; between hermeneutic articulations of meaning and materialist analyses of its modes of production and circulation; and much more” (Bernheimer, 2). Implicit in this survey of actual interests is the current broadening of the concept of literature and the questioning of its specificity, but also an entire range of phenomena felt throughout the humanities in general: the increasingly insistent presence of non-European literatures and cultures, the violent accusations of eurocentricity, the impact of other humanities and social science disciplines upon literary theory, the interaction but also the mutual questioning between elite and popular

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culture, the lively jolt dealt to the literary system by feminist and postcolonial readings, and the enormous diversification brought about by the variety of ethnic cultural groupings active within, without, or in the margins of the deceptively uncomplicated bodies that used to be national literatures – not to mention the questioning of the identity of the literary text itself and of its hermeneutic destiny. This already familiar list can help us to characterize and perhaps even explain the atmosphere of crisis in which literary studies have lived for some decades. It undoubtedly presents a compelling epistemological challenge. The 1993 acla report makes a radical statement concerning its impact on graduate studies: “Literary phenomena are no longer the exclusive focus of our discipline. Rather, literary texts are now being approached as one discursive practice among many others in a complex, shifting, and often contradictory field of cultural production” (Bernheimer, 3). One consequence of this state of affairs, wherever and whenever it may prevail, is that the study of “high literary discourse” is no longer seen as a separate discipline, and dealing with other “discursive practices” along with literature is no longer regarded as an interdisciplinary pursuit but precisely as part of “cultural studies.” If we broaden our perspective to culture as a whole, we are not crossing borders but rejoining an already existing dynamic. (I am still leaving aside the question whether this intellectual reconfiguration demands a reorganization of curricula and institutional structures.) In literature as in other arts and humanities disciplines, we are called upon not to abandon precise techniques of specifically rhetorical analysis or of prosody (or formal devices in arts other than literature) but to take into account the ideological, cultural, and institutional contexts in which these forms signify. The overall emphasis, then, is on the production of meaning. Inevitably, all the fundamental questions occur at once: In a literary text, who is speaking to whom, and in whose name? Is there such a thing as a literary text, and if yes, what makes it so? Logically this places on the agenda the question of the canon: “Comparative literature should be actively engaged in the comparative study of canon formation and in reconceiving the canon” (Bernheimer, 4). This need harbours three components: the examination of what enters the canon, but also of what determines the canon itself, and how, and last but not least of the manner in which less traditional readings (for example, the feminist or the post-colonial) of canonical texts contribute to expanding the canon. Hence a call for comparative literature to play an active role in “furthering the multicultural recontextualization of Anglo-American and European perspectives” (Bernheimer, 4). Minimally, this means broadening the linguistic and cultural scope of the usual comparative litera-

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ture offerings, not because it might be politically correct but because it accomplishes better the international and intercultural vocation of the discipline. It is only at this point that the 1993 report notes “some” affinity with cultural studies, pointing out at the same time that cultural studies have tended to be monolingual, and have concentrated on issues in specific contemporary popular cultures. My own stance is that comparative literature should continue to problematize the literature of the world inclusively, that is, by combining the resources of historical and theoretical thinking upon the symbolic universe. In a carefully thought-out response, Peter Brooks of Yale University first of all welcomes the openness of the acla report to broader interpretive contexts, especially in the face of what had perhaps been too narrow a commitment to “rhetorical reading of the deconstructive variety.” But he strongly objects to the apologetic tone with which the report treats the teaching of literature, as a discursive practice among others favoured only by an aging mandarin caste. He criticizes the report for recommending many changes that have in fact already occurred. Most importantly, he points out that all the programmatic wishes expressed by the report and its imperatives do not amount to a theoretical framework but to a roster of preferred activities underpinned by an undeclared ethical principle rather than by an endeavour to renew the coherence of a field of knowledge that might still be called poetics. Literary studies are still about literature, and to teach them still means to impart a constituted body of knowledge to be viewed self-critically, which is where theory has a role. With respect to life together in institutions of higher education, Brooks feels that comparative literature and cultural studies should be mutual interlocutors, not entities poised to devour each other. Finally, to take a stand on literary studies centring upon the study of literature is not to shun multiculturalism but to affirm that literature can indeed be a ground upon which the dialogue of cultures takes place. In other words, let cultural relativism not become cultural dogmatism! In a presidential forum of the Modern Language Association of America, Henry Louis Gates warned of the danger of a new imperialism that can implicitly be imposed in the name of cultural difference: “A salient difficulty raised by the variety of uses to which the term [multiculturalism] has been put is that multiculturalism itself has certain imperial tendencies. Its boundaries have not been easy to establish. We are told it is concerned with representations of difference – but whose differences? which differences? Almost all differences in which we take an interest express themselves in cultural ways; many, perhaps most, are exhausted by their cultural manifestations” (6). Cultural identities remain content with their self-expression, which leads

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to “cultural diversity” and cultivation of distance rather than encouraging study of difference per se. For that reason cultural “externalism” is not as good an ally as it first appears of gender or sexual identity. Sexual difference is a difference within, says Gates: “Othering starts in the home” (7). Some of the content alliances claimed by cultural studies, according to Gates, do not work well. Politically he advocates a pluralism in which cultural differences are recognized, critically discussed but mutually studied and understood so that identities are “in dialogue” rather than considered impenetrable, absolute, and so potentially hostile (11). But commonalities and differences among cultural assumptions have long been studied as possible bases for thought on the universal and the particular; literary scholars are in fact constantly warned to deflect situations in which a culture attempts to impose its own assumptions upon some or all others. In many ways, difference has been a triumphant link with the spirit of cultural studies. As a discipline, cultural studies have for a long time had an intellectual and institutional identity, notably in Great Britain, under the influence of thinkers such as Raymond Williams. For Williams literary texts are, among other things, objects of sociological and sociocritical study. He was a student of Leavis’s, whose stress on specifically literary values, which are those of an entire community, was notorious. Stressing the importance of both the text and “life” in culture, Williams rejected Leavis’s cultural elitism. Thus “culturalism,” of which Williams is only one representative among several, identifies high and popular culture as two existing realities within culture. Williams’s own choice is to place higher value on working-class cultural achievements. In doing so he in no way deterritorializes literature, which provides him with an inexhaustible reservoir of common experience. As he sets out to analyse the impact of mass media upon institutions, he does so not in terms of a competition between traditional and non-traditional means of communication but rather in terms of a quest for a “properly democratic communications system” (Milner, 41). But decades have elapsed, and some authors of cultural studies books have adopted a more aggressive way of describing the situation. “The field of cultural studies is experiencing […] an unprecedented international boom. It remains to be seen how long this boom will last and what impact it will have on intellectual life. Certainly, within the fragmented institutional configuration of the academic left, cultural studies holds special intellectual promise because it explicitly attempts to cut across diverse social and political interests and address many of the struggles within the current scene” (Nelson, 1). Thus far the favourable ambience, supported by numerous centres, programs, text-

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books, has indeed proved popular and gainfully so, since institutions tend to zero in quickly on the expected successes. The intellectual promise, however, has to be demonstrated in different terms, such as those we have been attempting to conceptualize. The editors of Cultural Studies also present a list of major categories of current work in the field, a list all the more disquieting since they also admit that there is no limit to what could be added to it in the future: “The history of cultural studies, gender and sexuality, nationhood and national identity, colonialism and postcolonialism, race and ethnicity, popular culture and its audiences, science and ecology, identity politics, pedagogy, the politics of aesthetics, cultural institutions, the politics of disciplinarity, discourse and textuality, history, and global culture in a postmodern age. But cultural studies can only partially and uneasily be identified by such domains of interest, since no list can constrain the topics cultural studies may address in the future” (Nelson, 1). Thus conceived, cultural studies would simply coincide with vast sectors of the humanities and of the social sciences, but only from a certain perspective, that of an ambition combining forces with postmodernism to feed its appetite for transgressiveness. In this spirit, cultural studies are decidedly and consciously moving away from literary studies: the expression “politics of aesthetics” relativizes in advance any unifying principle that would define literature. They are also going in the direction of “dissemination” favoured by Derrida, which emphasizes uniqueness and therefore incomparability, defying the universal/ particular dialectic so familiar to literary scholars. One of the new wave of cultural studies textbooks bears the challenging title Crusoe’s Footprints (1990). The title comes from an episode in which Robinson reacts with fear when he sees on the shore a footprint that he will for two years not be able to identify as his own or that of some frightening or hostile creature – an episode Michel de Certeau has used to symbolize the destabilization of the conquering bourgeois. The footprint becomes the symbol of the Other, of others, including Friday, whose language Robinson will never learn and who will remain other. “Crusoe’s solipsism can be read as the parabole of all forms of imperialism and political divisiveness that have divided people through history into masters and servants, the dominant and the dominated” (Brantlinger, 3). Following the “whole life” concept drawn from Raymond Williams, Brantlinger gives cultural studies the widest possible extension. Their final objective rejoins the lesson Crusoe was unable to learn, that “in order to understand ourselves, the discourses of ‘the other’ – of all the others – is [sic] that which we most urgently need to hear” (3). He admits, however, that the program of cultural studies is neither unified nor set but rather presents itself as a

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heterogeneous set of tendencies, problematics, questions, which also means that it brings in a variety of theories and methodologies: Marxism, feminisms, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, ethnography, etc. Brantlinger looks back to 1968, for the sixties movement put into question the epistemology of all the human sciences in a way one can easily see as continued by the cultural studies movement; the young, Habermas reminds us, are particularly sensitive to the untruth of preceding legitimations (5). Brantlinger in fact is just as balanced as Peter Brooks. For example, he does not contest the pedagogical ideal of the liberal arts, while at the same time he wishes to end their impotence; and he refrains from declaring that literature is dead. On the contrary, he advocates a more sustained presence of aesthetics, but wants it more devoted to serving historical and cultural representation; and here of course we encounter the question of aesthetic freedom, a freedom that in any case would appear quite consistent with the ethical objectives contemplated by Brantlinger. After sampling representative statements about the pros and cons of cultural studies, a brief sampling among attitudes of literary scholars whose work has been implicitly oriented towards cultural studies might provide us with a useful complement. A book of essays by the Québec scholar André Brochu, entitled La Visée critique (1968), consists of a combination of critical and autobiographical essays reminiscent of the now familiar osmosis among the genres and of the openness of autobiography to all the struggles of modern subjectivity. Particularly striking is a 1984 essay, “Littérature Québec,” where Brochu inquires into the future of literary studies in Quebec, into the far too incomplete educational conquests of the Quiet Revolution, the pedagogical schemes still all too dependent on those of France, not to mention theoretical frameworks that are also of French origin. In conclusion Brochu notes the feminization of the audience of literary studies, the precarious situation of those studies, and internal tensions that reflect those of a divided society still unhappy with its institutions of higher learning and still uncertain of its status as a francophone country. He also notes the power and strength of Quebec’s system of higher education, even if it lives “on a volcano.” As the author enumerates its cultural achievements and points out their social relevance, one is forcibly reminded of the challenge of cultural studies within the anglophone system of higher education. This example only serves to deepen our dilemma: literary studies need elbow room within higher education; they aspire in their own way to serve society; yet they will not serve it as well if they are restrained from retaining their specifically literary emphases.

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The question continues to arise whether and to what extent there is a coincidence between adhering to the notion of literary specificity and de facto opting in favour of “elitism.” Is the conjunction of these two elements a necessary one? (And does the fact of asking this question, which might be thought to expect an integrative response, make one immediately suspect of a comparatist vision based on some unavowed metafiction? I hope not.) I hope that literary phenomena can continue to inhabit the entire spectrum that goes from the popular to the highly sophisticated. There is a difference between seeking criteria of literariness and affirming that in order to be literary a text must exhibit them all: literary texts can be of interest to cultural studies for reasons other than form, but form is not automatically excluded from their purview; after all, it is the readership that ultimately sanctions literary identity; so that between the two extremes that would be the existence and non-existence of literariness we might conceive of a third option in which the literary emerges within the whole culture as a response to it, and harbours no promise of absolute literariness, always remaining an open and unstable category – in which, in other words, literature is process. This option also comes closest to the nature of canonization: the most coveted status carries within itself the greatest threat of obsolescence. Our quest would always remain exploratory, favouring frontiers over acquired territories, and look out for points of emergence of the literary within the cultural. In that perspective the literary differential is seen as process. We can think, for example, of folk-tales becoming literature for children and adults; or of the gradual entry of science fiction into the literary orbit. While speech-act theory would continue to emphasize the closeness between literary and ordinary communication, a theoretician such as Northrop Frye stressed that what enters the literary system should be studied not in terms of its socio-cultural origins but in its relation to the literary system itself. In our search for effective compatibilities, two additional points could be made. First, the osmosis between the literary and the cultural is in fact already well incorporated in literary studies; the challenge posed by cultural studies is to make it necessary to revisit the nature of that osmosis as new horizons of expectation, rooted in culture, create new aesthetic demands. The second, more philosophical point is that the current collapse of disciplinary boundaries should not lead us to renounce searching for an optimum status for literary studies but, on the contrary, to see the convergence of all human sciences in their struggle for intelligibility. One fundamental difference between literary and cultural studies that has not often been discussed is the focus of the latter upon the

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present, as part of their ethical and indeed political engagement. Literary studies, although their centre of gravity has also been shifting towards the twentieth century, continue to claim responsibility for the understanding of the entire literary system from the most remote past. Implicitly or explicitly literary history has often brought grist to the cultural studies mill by showing the emergence of specific literary genres, forms, conventions within culture. The first volume of the recent History of Criticism published by the Cambridge University Press concerns criticism in ancient Greece and Rome. This at the outset means that it regards as established not only the literary specificity of a number of Greek and Roman works and the set of genres among which they are allocated but also that it takes for granted, with respect to antiquity, the existence of a critical practice and of a body of criticism having theoretical implications. The ritual and oral origins of poetry are not denied, but a literary evolution, including a critical dimension, is shown to follow from them: “Criticism as an instinctive audience reaction to the performance of poetry is as old as song. Literary theory begins to emerge in Archaic Greece in the self-reference of oral bards and early literate poets and as part of the conceptualization of ideas which marked the birth of Greek philosophy” (Kennedy, ix). Poetry, especially dramatic poetry, is part of popular festivities; it is closely allied with religious myth, music, philosophy; as it gradually evolves into a specific phenomenon, its self-awareness also increases, and as change occurs – e.g., the decline of the epic – it begins to see itself historically. The response that could be made to this example is that from the cultural studies viewpoint it is not the existence of literature that is at issue – it is unlikely that anyone would challenge Jakobson’s distinction between marked and unmarked discourse – but its separateness within culture, and the norms that would give it a privileged status. The example of the double destiny of myth constitutes an excellent argument for literary specificity. Myth, which is “applied narrative […] describes a meaningful and important reality that applies to the aggregate, going beyond the individual” (Nagy, 3). Initially, myth is set apart because of its religious or social function, but the setting apart of it, with its musical and verbal consequences, creates a formal structure that will endure and repeatedly gain new signification, to be culturally reinvested again and again, often far beyond the borders of the culture of origin. Without formalization, however, this survival could not occur. The late Paul Zumthor devoted much thought to the abyss that separates the present-day scholar from the understanding of bygone cultures. His own theory, and praxis, consisted in seeking contact with the

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medieval world through the network of verbal signs it bequeathed to us, precisely in the material aspect of its textuality. To the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of New Literary History Zumthor contributed a study of the early modern travel narrative, an immensely diverse corpus that cannot initially be said to be unified by anything except its diffuse narrativity, its fascination with space, which is the meeting ground with the Other, and only gradually the desire for verifiable truth about that Other. The texts are literary only in the sense of open discourse. Gradually, the desire for episodes to illustrate moralities will give way to scientific curiosity as well as personal selfexpression. Narrativity, however, remains the foundation of writings of different times, places, and cultures; it challenges description (what was there when we came – geography – as opposed to what happened from our arrival – history); it attests and sanctions every claim to possession; it confronts the reader with the choice between real and imaginary. For these and many other reasons the travel narrative constitutes an excellent example of the complementarity of literary and cultural studies. Zumthor may not have written it in so many words, but he certainly presupposed in all his work – philological, historical, theoretical, cultural, and fictional – three propositions on which we would have happily agreed: 1. Humanity is still the one collective basis of the human sciences; 2. The human sciences have exploded and splintered, not unlike the cultures of the world; 3. Follow your project, literary or cultural. Chances are it will usefully complement the aggregate of scholarship.

works cited Bernheimer, Charles, et al. A Report to the a.c.l.a.: Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century. New York: Modern Language Association of America 1994. Brantlinger, Patrick. Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America. New York: Routledge 1990. Brochu, André. La Visée critique. Montréal: Boréal 1988. Brooks, Peter. “Must We Apologize?” 1994. Gates, Henry Louis. “1993 Presidential Forum Address.” Profession 93. New York: mla 1994. Kennedy, George A. Preface to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 1, Classical Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. ix–xv. Milner, Andrew. Contemporary Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: ucl Press 1994.

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Nagy, Gregory. “Early Greek Views of Poets and Poetry.” In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 1, Classical Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. 1–77. Nelson, Cary, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge 1992. Zumthor, Paul. “The Medieval Travel Narrative.” New Literary History 25 (1994): 809–24.

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5 Comparative Literature in Canada: Whence and Whither?

Canada is a vast country with a relatively small but hugely diverse population. Its educational system is largely entrusted to provincial rather than federal authorities. It is therefore even more perilous to generalize about the state of a discipline in Canada than in countries where higher education is more evenly dispensed, structured, supported. The scholars, works, and events presented here are meant to be a set of representative examples rather than a hierarchical listing in any sense. Comparative literature in Canada is attuned, generally speaking, to the international perspectives of the discipline. However, there is at present no unified international perspective on comparative literature, rather a set of problematics we all share. Because of Canada’s multicultural character, Canadian comparativists are well prepared to handle fragmentation of perspectives in the global village. They have a microcosm of it right at home. All the ironies, paradoxes, and fractures of postmodernity are part of the daily scene, so that even lethargic academics are forced to review the assumptions of their teaching and research. That often means that those who were trained in comparative literature either in the us or in the continental sense are finding their basic assumptions challenged. But many, if not most, faculty

Guest lecture at the Universities of Beijing and Jinan, July 1994. Published as a chapter in Comparative Literature Worldwide: Issues and Methods, ed. Tania Franco Carvalhal (Porto Alegre: L&PM Editores 1997), 81–97.

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members in comparative literature hold doctorates in national literatures rather than comparative literature itself. Having (in many cases) capitalized upon their personal knowledge of several languages and literatures, and earned additional qualifications in their teaching, research, and writing with increasing interdisciplinarity, they are not “intruders” but rather overtime workers in the discipline. Postgraduate degrees in the discipline having only been offered in Canada for the past twenty-five years or so, a younger workforce at least partly trained in comparative literature in Canada itself has been appearing, a workforce struggling to establish itself in the midst of unprecedented budgetary restraints. At any rate, nowhere in Canada is comparative literature practised any longer as a timid parallel study of texts in two or more languages exhibiting commonalities. There is implicit awareness of a world system of cultures of which we uncover interacting manifestations. Studies are examples striving to prove their exemplarity. This is refreshingly destabilizing; it helps to bring a renewed, more dynamic relationship between the theoretical and the historical in which theory (or, as it might more aptly be called, theorizing) acknowledges its situation in the here and now of the historical process. What about the “dialogue of cultures” that is supposed to be at the heart of Canadian comparativism? Perhaps Canadians can continue to claim it, as long as all naïveté is wrenched from the definition of the dialogical. The two solitudes, the anglophone and francophone, potentially stand as a metaphor of all non-communication. Think also of the alterity/identity of the native cultures, Inuit or Indian, not just as one big additional category but as a whole set of alterities, each striving for self-expression, recognition, communication; think of the explosion of immigrant literatures, each of which lives at the frontier of a “here” and a “there,” unaware perhaps of its candidacy to represent an “everywhere” precisely because it is a citizen of the frontier; think of the reunification of writers formerly in exile with the literatures of their origins. But whoever said that dialogue was an orderly, rational drawingroom discussion with some superego keeping score? As long as it is understood that dialogue is process, not conclusion, that the addressor can only attempt – and even that is rare – to empathize with the addressee, literary studies in Canada can still claim to be a locus of dialogue.

a brief history The institutional history of comparative literature in Canada is relatively brief. It happens that the beginnings of the Canadian Compara-

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tive Literature Association coincide in time with the birth of several of the major programs of comparative literature in the universities. The rise of the association is not unrelated to the frustration Canadian scholars felt in the early sixties with the procedures of the international association in the preparation of congresses: Canadians were included in the us quota and had no direct access to the selection process. This was formally protested during the preparation of the 1967 Belgrade congress. A number of Canadian scholars participated in the congress itself. They insisted on being received by the Canadian embassy. Neither the ambassador nor a cultural attaché was on hand, but a symbolic glass of sherry was offered by the highest-ranking official present in Belgrade in the heat of summer. The Canadian Comparative Literature Assciation had been conceived! Typically, the next meeting took place in the context of the Modern Language Association of America, in Chicago. In Canada a learned society in the human sciences used to be recognized by meeting under defined conditions with the Learned Societies congress in the late spring. During the 1968 Calgary congress of the Learned Societies a group of comparativists formally decided to form an association. The first congress took place at York University in 1969. The presidency was conferred upon Philip Stratford (Université de Montréal), who after two years was followed by Paul Chavy (Dalhousie). At the International Comparative Literature Association congress in Bordeaux (1970) twenty-five Canadian comparativists were present – Canadian in the sense that they worked at Canadian universities. It is a matter of historical record that twenty-three of these were not born in Canada, that the twenty-fourth had a Canadian mother but not a Canadian father, and that the twenty-fifth turned out not to hold any bona fide degrees. It was at the Bordeaux congress that the infant Canadian association was entrusted with organizing the Seventh Congress (Montreal-Ottawa, 1973) under the leadership of the undersigned. Twenty-one years later, in the summer of 1994, the international congress was once again held in Canada, this time in the west, at Edmonton, under the leadership of Milan Dimi´c. From the earliest the Canadian Comparative Literature Association endowed itself with a journal, the Canadian Comparative Literature Review, for many years under the editorship of Milan Dimi´c. The attractive but heavy responsibility of creating a scholarly journal had given rise to lively discussions: Canada already had Mosaic, which dealt with general cultural and literary issues; could it sustain a second major periodical in the field? The proponents of a specific journal for the association were proved right by its continued success.

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It cannot be said that comparative literature was never taught in Canada before the late sixties. Many a course, many a thesis, conference, article, monograph were conceived and carried out in an international perspective. A more detailed history would also show that, once we look beyond terminological resemblances with comparative literature in other countries, much was happening in Canada that was truly of the essence. Both Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan had developed some of their major theses. They were at opposite ends of the theoretical spectrum, yet strangely complementary. The thought of Frye was endlessly compatible, though he would not admit it, with all the formalisms and new criticisms that stressed the specificity of the literary work and, consequently, of reflection upon it which is criticism. Yet even in the Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and later in such works as The Critical Path (1971) he stressed the extent to which that specificity serves crucial social goals. McLuhan examined the impact of the new mass media and therefore popular culture; yet his transgressive analyses rest upon fundamentally humanistic conceptualizations based upon early modern paradigm shifts. In 1965 Northrop Frye gave the inaugural lecture in comparative literature at Carleton University, where single courses were taught in the discipline until a master’s program was instituted in 1968–69. McGill University had had a comparative literature committee, able to supervise individual students, for some time; but its program (modified in the nineties) began more intensively in the early seventies. The University of Toronto, Université de Montréal, and the University of British Columbia began their programs, to the best of my recollection, a year later, and the University of Alberta somewhat earlier. Montréal, Toronto, and Alberta were also authorized to deliver doctorates. Carleton only received that authorization thirty years after the inception of the program, and simultaneously embarked upon an undergraduate degree in the discipline. Alberta had had undergraduate students from the start. Elsewhere, some new initiatives have also arisen in recent years: the University of Manitoba organized a consultative conference with a view to initiating a comparative literature program; McMaster University has actually set up a master’s degree program; the University of New Brunswick held a workshop designed to ascertain the local capabilities to co-operate in an undergraduate program under conditions of severe budgetary restraint. The University of Western Ontario has announced an ma program. At York University and the University of Ottawa comparative literature has found a place within the English departments. Clearly, however, the impetus has slowed down relative to the dynamic seventies.

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co m pa r ati ve c a na d i a n li te ratu r e? One of the questions the movement faced initially was that of the existence or non-existence of comparative Canadian literature, and of the advisability or non-advisability of teaching such a subject. At a time when this meant mostly comparing the two dominant cultures of the country, the French and the English, the question was not irrelevant; it stemmed from the kind of definition of the discipline that favoured “comparing literatures.” But what constituted literatures? And what did comparing mean? At least one university, that of Sherbrooke, decided to specialize in comparative Canadian literature, conquered its PhD program, and founded a periodical, Ellipse, devoted to problems of poetry translation and comparative analyses of poetical texts. Once it became understood that the shared problematics did not have to be of a historical nature (e.g., that you could undertake a parallel study of poetry, French and English, in Montreal between 1935 and 1945 – the topic of an actual ma thesis – even if the respective poets had very little contact with one another), the field assumed meaning. It generated a new learned society: the Association for Québec and Canadian Literature, in addition to the Canadian association, and also an international association, of Canadian studies, which are completely interdisciplinary. Thus, comparative literature is by no means the only milieu where the English and French Canadian literatures are discussed in relation to one another. The structure of research communication in Canada, and especially that of the Learned Societies, is such that joint colloquia, conferences, or more informal consultations between scholars in diverse disciplines can be flexibly arranged. As awareness grew of the importance of concerted attacks in the human sciences upon all the major questions regarding the validity of knowledge in the human sciences, the relationships between knowledge and power, the need for freedom of research on culture, and the need for socially responsible application of research, this possibility of interdisciplinary communication became increasingly valuable. But in some respects the initial question remained: is there such a thing as comparative Canadian literature? Some sane voices, such as those of Philip Stratford, Ronald Sutherland, Antoine Sirois, and David Hayne, simply took the field for granted: here is a country with two major literatures; let us explore their commonalities and differences bibliographically, thematically, structurally. The unease did not reside there but in the very concept – just then wearing thin in many countries, not only in Canada – of a comparative literature the very

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definition of which arises from the problematic concept of the a priori existence of national literatures. If you have two peoples politically federated in one national state, wherein lies the nationhood of its literature? Gradually, it became clear that the desire for political unity must not impose its politics upon literary and cultural research, lest we reap what we have sown: an artificial product that does not benefit either unity or separation. Rather, the exploration of both English and French Canadian literature was to proceed in terms of their linguistic and cultural separateness, that is, much as when, in comparative literature, we deal with two or more “national” literatures. Simultaneously, the two literatures deepened their awareness of being North American as distinct from their respective European origins, Canadian as distinct from the giant south of the border, and deeply linked with all other postcolonial literatures of the Commonwealth and of Francophonie.

major questionings Since many of the programs were developed in the late sixties or early seventies, they were by and large spared the task that faced countless departments of national literatures: to revise or at least validate the historical structure of their curricula and to reconceive course offerings along theoretical lines. Again speaking very generally, it was not only opportune and attractive for the new programs to focus upon theoretical problematics but relatively easy in the absence of heavy curricular pasts. (Curricular change is always difficult. To be able to achieve curricular innovation without bloodletting is sheer good luck!) Few professors were appointed to comparative literature programs on a fulltime basis; cross-appointments were the general rule, which meant that only a minimum of staff time could be spent on the teaching of comparative literature. Naturally, that teaching had to concentrate on areas, first, necessary to all students of Comparative Literature, and second, not offered or at least not uniformly offered by departments of national literatures. These were the practical reasons for the massive adoption of theory as the common subject-matter. But there were deeper reasons, still recognizable and recognized today. Comparative literature is forever threatened by heterogeneity (“comparing apples and oranges”). In order that there may be valid comparability, homogeneous series of phenomena must be obtained, and these can only be theoretically derived. At least some of the tendency to condemn traditional literary history came from the imprecision of its basic categories: “facts,” “causes,” “influences,” even periods, not to mention schools and movements. Epistemologically valid constructs were being sought, to replace the

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epistemologically invalid ones. In 1974 the International Comparative Literature Association, in a symbolic gesture, integrated literary theory among its areas of study. This meant that in a number of countries, Canada included, comparative literary theory had become the metadiscourse of the discipline. That the anti-historical pendulum was swinging too far, to the point of generating a closed theoretical discourse when the aim of the exercise had been to open theoretical discourse to the richness of difference, is again a matter of record. Today we hear more about the excesses than about the advantages of theory, and comparative literature programs find themselves embattled once again, this time because of the attraction of cultural studies; but now the curricula are already set up along theoretical lines, and the challenge is to keep the concept of the specificity of literature within culture from becoming an ivory tower philosophy, remembering that the movement towards theory itself began as a critical reaction against another kind of dogma! At the time of their establishment, however, and ever since, the various comparative literature programs have distributed themselves along the theoretical spectrum; in other words, they have developed specializations along theoretical lines. Let us consider a few significant examples. Because of its earlier Marxist, or perhaps post-Marxist background the McGill group has concentrated on the theory of social discourse defined as “the sum total of all that is said and written in a given state of society, inasmuch as this whole does not appear composed of haphazard utterances but, on the contrary, utterances ruled by conventions, taken from ideological configurations” (Marc Angenot, quoted in Barsky, 239). In this definition several elements point to the philosophy and methodology of this group, whose main exponent is Marc Angenot and which co-operates actively with members of the Sociology Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal in discourse-analysis projects. The concept of sum-total, or whole of discourse, relates to the unprecedented widening of the concept of literature, which is hardly news in the postmodern ambience. Angenot does not deny that certain texts are more poetic than others, and lend themselves to specifically literary analysis. What he does stress is that those texts cannot be wholly isolated from the rest of social discourse, which also carries many other forms of cultural expression, be it popular literature, science fiction, children’s literature, scientific and political texts, oral texts, and so on. In other words, “social discourse” refers to the broadest possible concept of culture and ascribes no superior value to the poetic as opposed to the non-poetic. Individuals may respond differently to a poem and to a comic; all Angenot tells us is that both texts are part of one social discourse, subject therefore to

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correlated ideological constraints. This emphasis implies at the outset a search for what makes cultures homogeneous. Angenot will seek out such recurrences by studying in depth a given year – say, the year 1889 in France, to which he has devoted a major monograph – making use of the concept of hegemony, the set of mechanisms that work together towards determining what in a society can be written or said, how it is expressed, and what common grounds will legitimate discourse. Even dissenting voices meet those of the majority on the common thematic ground that is their joint creation. How does contradiction arise? A “novum” will appear, yet unsaid, authentically other, and create a breaking-point, not simply by contradicting hegemony – opposition still rests on resemblance – but by introducing a radical difference. How do we decide that the seemingly new is not just a variant upon the already existent? According to Barthes, language imprisons us; Foucault constantly points to the power of control of the social discourse; nor does Habermas promise the individual who opposes these normalizing powers anything save the selfsatisfaction of absolute criticism. Thus the “transgressive unthought” may be but a fertile hope that satisfies our longing for novelty. Real innovation, however, may begin in unspectacular ways: the “heterological novum” may lurk beneath the familiarly outrageous. The social discourse is organized into canonical, recognized, centralized sectors; dissidence appears in the margin. Hegemony will further fragment what appears in those margins (e.g., feminisms and socialisms in France). Hegemony needs acceptability, the discursive efficiencies of which appear to Angenot a “historical mystery” (quoted in Barsky, 259); acceptability possesses no aesthetics; its metalanguage is yet to be invented. (Here it may be useful to remember – though Angenot himself does not draw this parallel – that according to Lyotard the yetto-be-born aesthetic is a mark of postmodernism). Thus hegemony is organized in such a way as to make the really new sound ridiculous, all the more since crises do not always produce new languages to describe them. The theory of social discourse can work in complementarity with other theoretical frameworks, notably the polysystem theories developed in Israel and Belgium. Angenot seems to teach us more about the underlying reasons for changes in discourse, Even-Zohar about the actual functioning of canonization and decanonization. The program of the Research Institute for Comparative Literature in Canada, situated at the University of Alberta, also assumes the complementarity of several theoretical approaches in its studies of the history and sociology of the “literary institution,” the framework gov-

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erning the conditions of production and reception of literary texts in Canada. The concept of polysystem is helpful here in transcending the opposition between synchrony and diachrony: the interaction of literary systems in contact does not submit to mathematical time. Early in its history the Alberta group tended to study the material signs of the institution in preference to internal, textual studies. More recently the importance of the “conflict of codes,” a concept specially favoured by the late André Belleau of Montréal, has been used, particularly in connection with the emergence of postcolonial literatures opposing hegemonic structures. For example, the Alberta group has studied the critical reception of literary works in Quebec during a defined span of time – the seventies – as part of the literary history of French Canada, analysing the dialectic between the symbolic and the social function of literary works and explaining the rise of these works between the two poles. The institution recognizes, sanctions, legitimates works in a variety of ways, including their critical reception, which initiates their classification, thus influencing their eventual place in history; the genuinely new and other, as conceptualized by the social-discourse theory, appears (whether recognized or ignored) during this process. “Disturbing” works, those that defy categories, demand the most discussion. Prefaces and literary manifestos constitute a particularly important space for the Alberta group’s study of reception and its impact on the institutionalization of texts (Blodgett et al.). Such paratextual information supplies a framework for reading, and even for evaluating the need for reading a given text. Here the reader plays a crucial role, as the “contrat de lecture” is shaped by the reading of the paratextual material: “While the manifesto aims at a shift in the paradigm and consequently a re-ordering of the institution, the reader, who acts upon its promptings, becomes an agent of the desired change. The writer of the manifesto moves between language and metalanguage, remaining ineluctably apart from the institution …; the reader becomes the empowering figure of the manifesto, representing the cultural institution as closure” (14). Thus the Alberta group also stresses the role of the reader in the process of literary communication. This emphasis in turn helps to explain the complexity and differentiation that characterize the polysystemic nature of literary communication. Endowed with much power, the literary institution is an unstable product since it provokes both assent and resistance on the part of the reader. About the Toronto group it is extremely difficult to generalize. It can at least be said without distortion that the problem, if not the affirmation, of the identity of the literary text remains very central to it,

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in reaction to the intense questioning of which the literary text has generally been the object in recent years, notably on the part of theoreticians who attribute greater reality to the reader’s response than to the meaning originally encoded by the author. Some time ago the Toronto group published a collective book entitled Identity of the Literary Text, which constitutes a valuable record of its discussions in this regard, both internally and with invited scholars. “We used to be satisfied with the notion that a literary masterpiece was inexhaustible in that new readings … could always uncover new beauties that belonged to the work’s identity but had not hitherto been revealed. Recent emphasis on conflicting interpretations has made the notion of an all-inclusive identity seem inappropriate, and therefore theorists have attempted to work out what is ‘in’ the text – part of its unchanging identity – and what is contributed by the reader” (Culler, 3–4). Many features of texts previously considered inalienable characteristics of their structure could in fact be said to be unveiled by interpretive strategies, and even to be results of these. Some may even think, along with Stanley Fish, that the reader, far from being a fixed entity and thus an objective, unitary source, is also the product of an interpretive community. At any rate, the text is always a locus of subjectobject relations; theories are perpetually in danger of falling into what Jonathan Culler calls “monisms” – one-sided answers to the problem of what constitutes the text, whether they overemphasize the author’s intended meaning or, obversely, stress in too exclusive a way the creative role of the reader and/or of the interpretive community. Precisely because literariness, the specificity of poetic language, self-referentiality, have been so diversely challenged, it is important to probe each particular challenge in order to see more clearly what remains literary and how this transforms the task of critical theory. If, according to Derrida, “writing is an orphan” and the text is bereft of the author as source of meaning; if, according to speech-act theory, literary texts, far from being uniquely aesthetic, have parallels in everyday utterances, wherein lies the identity of the literary text? The authors of Identity of the Literary Text explore the grounds for asserting the existence of textual constraints upon interpretation, and that of textuality itself, in the sense that they envisage the object of interpretation as possibly also being process rather than a permanently set entity. “What emerges … is not the abandonment of identity per se, but a reformulation of it as a relational rather than a constitutive notion. The belief that textual identity is not an a priori given but a process worked out in the act of reading would seem to be a position likely to command a fairly widespread acceptance in today’s intellectual and cultural climate” (Miller, xix). It would also appear to be the common

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ground of the Toronto group, whose individual theories widely diverge in other respects. In his various books Mario Valdés emphasizes above all the relational nature of literature as locus of linguistic communication; thus, for him the “author” is not only the individual originator of the text but also the community that receives and sanctions the text as literary, that is, expressive of its vision as community. What Valdés calls worldmaking, that is, the creation of imaginary worlds, occurs between the community and the individual. Hence his emphasis on interpretation: knowledge of literature should focus less on the moment of production of the text and more on its understanding by successive individuals in successive historical settings, to arrive at the cognition of “shared meanings.” Every new appropriation belongs to the substance of the text. Thus Valdés’s hermeneutic stand complements, and indirectly confirms Lubomír Dole3el’s insistence that while there is such a thing as the identity of the text, identity is not a given but a semantic construct combining a fictional world and a personal style. Fictional worlds are incomplete: they neither faithfully portray nor replace the “real” everyday world; they exist for their own sake – in addition to it, so to say – and thereby enrich reality. Readers interpret fictional worlds variously. Readings are therefore complementary, in a virtually dialogical relationship to one another. The plurality of interpretations generated by the text brings additional evidence of the richness of its identity. Linda Hutcheon’s emphases are of a different nature because she is not worried by the fragility of our definitions. Having adopted the ambience and exigencies of postmodernism, she takes for granted the problematic presence of literature in culture, with all the diversity this implies. She is particularly interested in self-reflexive narratives, not as demonstrations of literariness but as examples of the reinsertion of art into social reality. “The continuity between the modernist and the postmodernist is a very real one, but what distinguishes them … is that in the postmodern this self-consciousness of art as art is paradoxically made the means to a new engagement with the social and the historical world, and that this is done in such a way as to challenge (though not destroy) our traditional humanist beliefs about the function of art in society” (2–3). In other words, art may be self-reflexive without being self-sufficient or self-serving, though this does not mean that it directly serves societal goals. By her studies on parody and irony Hutcheon tracks precisely this lack of conclusive correspondence between the work of art and society. The postmodern work of art interrogates, fragments, subverts; it topples genre barriers; it disturbs space and time, ensuring that no established aesthetic convention

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ideologically represses the freedom of the imagination. It uproots and dissuades the hierarchical in relations between selves, genders, cultures, nations. Unavoidably, if such is art and, more particularly, if such is literature, critical theory is divested of any remaining shreds of normativity; its role is to reflect upon, and preserve, all this freedom of interaction. In comparison, Wladimir Krysinski (Université de Montréal) attributes greater importance to the cognitive function of literature, which he explores semiotically. Through fiction, particularly the modern novel, society speaks to itself. The work of the theoretician is to examine the fabric of the novel as epistemological tool. That fabric is not haphazard. “The novel is an oriented discourse” whose creation is guided by the cognitive contract between author and reader (Carrefours, 161). The novel produces a system of signs that is individual yet obeys a set of constraints possessing global signification. The semiotic examination of the novel unveils the author’s theoretical intent. The novel’s truth-claim, including its complex combination of referentiality and non-referentiality, can only be understood by a parallel study of the homologies of its pragmatic, syntactic, semantic structures. Here my notations do not do justice to Krysinski’s model-building, which disregards superficially theoretical generalizations to show that there are structured ways of gaining knowledge of fictional worlds as indirect expressions of precise situations. Le Paradigme inquiet: Pirandello et le champ de la modernité transfers to the world of theatre Krysinski’s monumental endeavour demonstrably to encapsulate the signifying power of art – and specifically, in the case of Pirandello, the power to problematize modern subjectivity. Since there can be no conclusion to this sampling of comparative literature studies in Canada, let this avowal of incompleteness serve in lieu of conclusion.

works cited Barsky, Robert F., ed. Discours social 1 no. 3 (1988). Blodgett, E.D., A.G. Purdy, and S. Tötösy de Zepetnek, eds. Prefaces and Literary Manifestos / Préfaces et manifestes littéraires. Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta 1990. Culler, Jonathan. Introduction to Identity of the Literary Text, ed. Valdés and Miller. 3–15. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary EnglishCanadian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988. Krysinski, Wladimir. Carrefours de signes: essais sur le roman moderne. La Haye: Mouton 1981.

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– Le Paradigme inquiet: Pirandello et le champ de la modernité. Montréal: Le Préambule 1989. Miller, Owen. Preface to Identity of the Literary Text, ed. Valdés and Miller. vii– xxi. Valdés, Mario, and Owen Miller, eds. Identity of the Literary Text. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1985.

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6 Theory, Theories, Theorizing, and Cultural Relativism

In his Les Morales de l’histoire Tzvetan Todorov pinpoints the reason why the human sciences will forever fail to reach a healthy division of functions between “subjectivity” and “objectivity” the more they try to avoid deformations in both directions. No matter how careful we are to treat the object of our study scientifically, it will at some point want to “speak” to us; such is its specificity. This kind of statement confirms the trajectory of many contemporary scholars who have been profoundly concerned with establishing the validity of our knowledge prior to attempting any new construction. Admittedly, the process of self-legitimation has been highly therapeutic in that it has destabilized and (intellectually at least, if not in actual library catalogues) swept away works, trends, and probably entire sub-disciplines based on insufficiently analysed assumptions. “Positivistic” literary history, a favourite example, was ready for a sound whipping in that regard. It was duly chastised. But literary history did not die. Rather, it has tended to renounce vast syntheses, to become more inductive, less reliant on preconceived periodizations, more content with the fragmentary, the particular, more reconciled to being what it had always been without knowing it – a discourse of its own time – the

Chapter in The Search for a New Alphabet: Literary Studies in a Changing World, Essays in Honour of Douwe Fokkema, ed. H. Hendrix, J. Kloek, S. Levie, W. van Peer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins 1996), 124–8.

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difference being that, in postmodernity, it can view being a discourse of its own time as an exciting opportunity. What neither historians of literature nor their critics fully realized was that the criticisms directed at literary history might in fact have been applicable to other forms of exposition within literary studies as well as to other areas of historical exposition than literature; that the flaw did not lie in the historicity but in the totalizing, “foundational” character of traditional literary history, including comparative literary history. It was – and often still is – in that kind of connection that critical theory became the intellectual “goad,” not only of literary studies but of the human sciences in general. It is not my purpose here to describe historically the process whereby theory pursued a double path: on the one hand, a critical one, negative at least in appearance, undoing established constructions by revealing the presuppositions and forces at work in them (remember FreudoMarxism?), and, on the other, a proactive one, generating constructions of its own. Any attempt to periodize this set of phenomena would lead to oversimplification, especially if we seek to gain an international perspective. The various formalisms, new criticisms, and structuralisms as well as their legacies have tended towards construction and systematicity (once they dismantled traditional literary history). One would hear them grandly define literary theory as the science of discourse. They have also helped to pave the way to far greater interdisciplinarity in the human sciences, which in turn demands constant theoretical attention lest any falsely foundational concept come to predominate. As poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminist and postcolonial readings, and readers’ response gain ground, destabilization of meaning appears to be their common pursuit while new signification and interpretation tend towards the singular; in the process, theory itself loses its privileged domain of unlimited generalization. It, too, is (and has it not always been?) part of the social discourse of its day; it, too, can be regarded as a cultural practice among others, the special calling of which is reflection upon discourse. At that point, of course, the very concept of theory has to be re-examined; we have to venture, ever so briefly, into theory of theory. This leads to the question: has the function of theory within our studies changed significantly in the recent past? Or are we not simply seeing an attitudinal change away from the construction and application of theories and towards theorizing the object of our studies? In my view this has long been the case in vast sectors of literary theory, without being explicitly so stated by its main exponents. Yet what are, for example, speech-act theory, pragmatic studies, empirical studies and

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what is hermeneutics if not imperative calls to immerse our investigations in the concreteness of process? Like philosophy (see Vattimo, among others), literary theory appears to have renounced systems; or, where it actively claims the advantages of systematicity, as in semiotics or in the polysystem theory, it will favour descriptive rather than prescriptive strategies. The proceedings of a recent conference on The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis, edited by Mieke Bal and Inge E. Boer, go much further in dealing with the changing role of theory: they announce its death – and resurrection. But is it theory that is dead, or its caricature in various academic circles? The kind of academic circles that heralded the death of literary history at the hands of literary theory, and more recently have sacrificed literary theory on the altar of cultural studies? No scholar is quite innocent of proffering (or just presupposing) such generalities; when we critically analyse the perspective of others, we should also let them correct our own. The above-mentioned conference appears to have struck precisely the open-minded and experimental vision that I would advocate. It started from the premise that theory is a set of attitudes rather than the accustomed attempt to universalize upon a set of theoretical assumptions that inevitably will change tomorrow (or will already have changed today). It favoured interdisciplinary reflection of the kind that tries out conceptual tools drawn from one discipline to solve problems in another, without ceasing to focus on the area of knowledge the researcher knows best. It saw theory as interacting with the objects of knowledge rather than, ultimately, with itself. In his contribution to the conference proceedings Jonathan Culler offers many insights into the manner in which theory has been and currently is perceived. He deals with theory the panacea, or “organon of methods,” as Wellek and Warren designated it, and with theory the scarecrow of many a student. Let us note in passing that these two opposite extremes have in common an excessive expectation of the potential benefits of theory. Culler also deals with the attraction and perils of juxtaposing many theoretical problems, vistas, methodological approaches as is often done in a host of courses that again embody extremes or at least are in danger of doing so: some tend to isolate literature from other pursuits and from life itself by encouraging selfreflexivity; others look at the widest possible range of discourses in order to let them learn from one another. Are the latter two connotations mutually incompatible? Not if one accepts Culler’s concluding remark according to which new understanding will stem precisely from the fear of the unfamiliar. On the strength of this observation we should, however, go much further. Re-

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humanizing theory, especially by making it into an adventurous experience, is undoubtedly a gain. We should, however, beware of letting it become just another return of the pendulum (for instance, from excluding any consideration of humanism, humaneness, subjectivity because they might interfere with the scientificity of the literary discourse, thus spoiling the prospect of comparability with the exact sciences; to excluding any consideration of or hope for objectivity on methodological, philosophical, or moral grounds). “Swings of the pendulum” is at any rate a deceptive metaphor because, given the complexity of the field we are attempting to describe, the next phase is far from predictable even if we can safely venture to forecast that it will be a reaction against the previous phase. By the same token, sweeping either-or choices between oversimplified theoretical stances could be eliminated as false choices. For example, today we can see in perspective that it was not necessary for scholars to opt between literary theory and literary history, two complementary dimensions of reflection upon literature. Douwe Fokkema was among those who propounded this complementarity (see Angenot, et al. chap. 14). Since the moment of the false choice between theory and history, theory has plunged into historicity as part of its object. Also, the historicity of theory, if and when it turns its gaze upon itself, has become far more visible. This is where we encounter cultural relativity if not necessarily relativism: theoretical discourse, as any other discourse, originates in a given place at a given time. It cannot but belong to the intellectual history of that place, of that time. Yet its very constitution is centrifugal; it always demands to be validated at a higher level of generality than other forms of discourse, ultimately for the sake of an overall coherence that may be utopian but cannot be denied existence as an ideal goal. Thus, while it is necessary to recognize the diversity and heterogeneity of theoretical issues among the human sciences, there is no excuse for not allowing diverse disciplinary domains to exchange experiences, parameters, methodological advice. But a new obstacle arises when we probe another, more recent either-or: the opposition between literary and cultural studies. This cannot be lightly dismissed as another false opposition, though ultimately it may be an ill-conceived one for many reasons, such as the variability of the denotation and extension of the concept of literature, the astounding heterogeneity of what, in the United States at any rate – as opposed to the historically more cogent British experience – is subsumed under cultural studies, the obviously political agenda of numerous cultural studies problematics. Yet who is to throw the first stone? It should not be forgotten that, in the sixties and seventies, it

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was theory that was cast in the negative, investigative, destabilizing role that cultural studies assume today! But a deeper and greater problem arises from the fact that, whatever label we may adopt for our particular field of reflection within the human sciences, the metatheoretical apparatus for any procedure whatsoever must be examined for cultural variability. Not to subject it to such questioning would invalidate chances for wider applications; to do so will always imply the risk that a theoretical insight cannot be universalized, or at least that equivalents will have to be sought from culture to culture. It is, for example, reasonably safe to assume that everywhere, at all times, and among all peoples human experience becomes enshrined in symbolical narratives. Cultural anthropology has been supplying us with models making intelligible the relationship, say, between mytheme and mythologem, and we have been blithely demonstrating that the relationship between these two structures is as arbitrary as that of signified and signifier, so that mythologies of widely separated times and regions can be superimposed into more and more universally valid models. Yet I suspect that an assumption governs these orgies of comparability, namely that (as was so well understood in the European Middle Ages) not all meanings are literal. But if it is assumed that meanings are literal, which cultures with fundamentalist attitudes may well assume, the model may not lose its heuristic value, but it will not work pedagogically in such an environment. Why cultivate theory at all if any attempt to universalize is so fraught with difficulties? There are more reasons than previously for doing so. Agreed-upon truths do not require demonstration; emerging truths do, and as the pace of discovery quickens, the intensity of the need for authenticating them also increases. Therein lies the ongoing need for shared theoretical reflection.

works cited Angenot, Marc, Jean Bessière, Douwe Fokkema, and Eva Kushner, eds. Théorie littéraire: problèmes et perspectives. Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1989. Bal, Mieke, and Inge E. Boer, eds. The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press 1994. Todorov, Tzvetan. Les Morales de l’histoire. Paris: Grasset 1991.

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part two Changing Perspectives in Literary History

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7 Diachrony and Structure: Thoughts on Renewals in the Theory of Literary History

There can be no doubt that literary history is and has been for several decades under a scrutiny so severe that only a thorough theoretical and epistemological re-examination can restore it to its place in literary scholarship, provided also that a renewed practice follows upon this re-examination. That the demand for it stems from the various “intrinsic” approaches to the study of literature is a well-known fact: Russian Formalism, the Prague Circle, New Criticism, Nouvelle critique, as well as the structuralist and semiotic approaches have all tended to lead the literary scholar towards a close reading and analysis of the text itself and away from genetic types of study motivated by the belief in antecedents, whether literary or extraliterary, having a causative effect in the production of literary text. I wish to show that if the “genetic fallacies” now belong to the past history of literary historiography, they are still present (potentially and often manifestly) in the present practice of literary history inasmuch as the intellectual motivation underlying genetic fallacies tends to survive unless, or until, it gives way to a better understanding of the historicity of the literary work. This in turn requires us to assimilate the conquests of the intrinsic approaches to literary scholarship and particularly the notion of the specificity of the literary work of art. But having assimilated these elements and focused its inquiry upon the literary works

Guest lecture at the University of Southern California, April 1974. Published in Synthesis 5 (1978): 37–50.

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themselves, literary history must find its way out of what Erich Lohner has called the methodological impasse of intrinsic studies; in the words of Kurt Miller-Vollner, “how can we understand a poetic world at all without relating it to the world which we know?” (107) The isolating of the work of literature from a world of change for purposes of analysis and aesthetic evaluation is a moment of literary scholarship, a necessary moment but not a sufficient one; and the next step appears to be in the direction of renewed efforts to situate literary works in diachronic perspective with respect to one another and with respect to the changing “horizons” (Jauss) of successive generations of readers. It could be said, in summary, that historicism, of which two types of illustration will be given, represents one extreme in its misplacement of the object of literary scholarship but that structuralism represents another. These two tendencies have often been depicted as opposed to each other because historically the latter has been a reaction against the former; yet in our view both in fact have analogous effects upon literary research when they are conceived and practised narrowly, because both tend to impose abstract systems and models upon literary works in their interrelationships. The positivistic form of the genetic fallacy has often been associated with the name of Lanson, who is reputed to have built literary history upon patient accumulation of data, frequently of a nature extrinsic to the literary work. When describing his own method of literary research Lanson admits, strikingly enough, that such skills as those concerned with the genesis and critical editing of texts, as well as biography and social, economic, and political history – that is, ultimately all areas of knowledge giving circumstantial evidence about works of literature – are auxiliary skills rather than the mainstream of literary history. It is also interesting to note that Lanson’s demand for objectivity appears to have been his own safeguard against emotion, which he feared, it can be surmised, precisely because he was prone to it. This made him aware of that which any historical thinker of today knows clearly: that the past is reconstructed by a mind that intervenes in the reconstruction. Lanson wished to impose neutrality upon this mind. This was, on his part, overreaction to what he recognized as a central fact of literary historiography: the emotional appeal of the literary work of art to the reader, even the critical reader. Lanson chose to steel himself against “subjectivity” and thus generated a type of literary historiography in which the individual work is not set within and yet apart from historicity (even the historicity of the present) as it ought to be. The demand (fortunately not observed by Lanson in his own critical writings, his Boileau, for instance, which is written in a delightfully personal way) that the personality of the historian be suppressed in the

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writing of literary history is one of the deeper reasons for the epistemological weakness of “positivism” in literary history. Even in general history the informed knowledge and reconstruction of the past, if Marrou’s concept may be used as an example, can only exist qua reconstruction of events that in themselves are irretrievable. In literary history, of course, in contradistinction to the history of nations, civilizations, cultures, the main occurrence is still in the hands of the modern historian in the guise of the literary text. The main fault of Lansonisme and similar tendencies, philosophically speaking, is not so much their pedestrian methodology as a kind of ontological confusion between history as res gestae (the works as they were once written and received) and the literary history whose objects live into the present, preserve their own individuality, but whose “history” is an ever-renewed and renewable synthesis of present with past. The interaction of the historian with even such a remote work as the Aeneid is not the same as his interaction with archival documents because aesthetic experience of the work of literature does make a radical difference. The Lansonian approach tends (without necessarily meaning to do so) to obliterate the difference between the perception, or the concretization, as Ingarden would say, of a literary work of art and that of an archival document. Yet in a renewed literary historiography this distinction should be most alive. This is tantamount to saying that the literary historian should above all concentrate on the diachronic relations of literary works with other literary works. How obvious this sounds! and yet many past misconceptions stem precisely from neglect of the specificity of the literary work of art (specificity does not mean autonomy, and concentration upon the study of the features of the literary work from an aesthetic point of view and their relationships with those of other literary works does not exclude other moments of study that take into account relationships with other realities, external to literature). It is only to the extent that literary history can be systematized in terms of its own internal sets of structures that we can – in another phase – fruitfully integrate and compare it with the study of other systems such as the societal. Lansonisme and other kinds of positivism in literary history tend, by contrast, to force extraliterary and insufficiently conceptualized categories upon the development of literature, with the result that time, in their perspective, is not the specific time of literature but a sequence of abstract and thus arbitrary blocks. Periodization of literature within these static blocks becomes reductive. Rigid classification of works into movements and trends can be equally abstract and reductive. Alongside Lansonisme and allied tendencies, the other series of trends inherited from past centuries and often still present in the

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practice of literary history is of the evolutionary type. Its epistemological weakness usually lies in the fact that it assimilates the changes that occur in the history of literature with those of other sectors of timebound reality, such as biological evolution. Such extrapolations of scientific concepts for use in the humanities were particularly numerous in the nineteenth century; but philosophical systems can lead to similar extrapolations. Claudio Guillén reminds us that Friedrich Schlegel was conscious of what happens to literary history when its categories are subsumed under those of the history of thought, or made to merge with a dogmatic philosophy of history. In 1796 Schlegel wrote to his brother August Wilhelm: “Wehe dem Kenner, der sein System mehr liebt als die Schönheit, wehe dem Theoristen, dessen System so unvollständig und schlecht ist, dass er die Geschichte zerstören muss, um es aufrecht zu erhalten!” (Guillén, 413). Yet F. Schlegel’s lectures of 1812 on literary history do not heed his own warning. He links the rise and the significance of national literature with those of the national consciousness, especially in the case of Germany, and he constantly implies that genres in national literatures (as well as the national literatures themselves) reach an acme of perfection, and gradually decay and die – as if they were animal species. In what Ulrich Weisstein calls the “pre-history” of comparative literature, that is, the long series of attempts that occurred in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century to view the history of literatures as an international process, the evolutionary or developmental viewpoint is almost invariably present. Indeed, it was necessary to the search for unity or at least an order in the immense diversity of the literatures of the world, or even the literatures of the West alone. But the manner of imposing that order made the various systems obsolete so quickly. The very title of one of Mme de Staël’s treatises betrays a reductive tendency: De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales. In it the author writes, “I have set out to examine the influences of religion, customs and laws on literature and the reciprocal influence of religion, customs and laws. In French there are certain treatises on the art of writing and the principles of taste which leave nothing to be desired; but it seems to me that one has not yet considered how the human faculties have gradually developed by means of the famous works which have been composed in every genre, from Homer to the present day.” Clearly, then, Mme de Staël relates the successes of literature to the general progress of the human mind, within the framework of the concept of perfectibility. In this perspective, aesthetic progression must follow the rhythm of scientific and social progress; and the specificity of the literary works themselves and of their interrelatedness is lost from sight.

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Today’s literary historian, by contrast, is highly aware of this specificity. This does not mean that he abstracts literature from life in an absolute manner. To pretend that Dead Souls has no link whatsoever with serfdom in Russia would be preposterous; to say that Zola in L’Assommoir had nothing to declare concerning the disease of alcoholism and those other diseases called poverty and exploitation would be contrary to what is known to be the case from the novel itself and from the author’s declaration of intention in Le Roman expérimental. The naturalist novel cannot be divorced from the social and economic problems of its time; it is, one might say, particularly weighted in the direction of temporality. But for that very reason it is a good example upon which to discover the difference between referential and literary discourse, between denotation and connotation. The distilling machine in L’Assommoir is described with precision from a physical point of view, but a stylistic analysis reveals the apparatus to be a monster devouring the lives and hopes of men. In the same way, as Gervaise looks out the window at the beginning of the novel, the vista she sees is a photographic description of a Paris street in the morning. But there is an additional message in Zola’s description of the masses of workers merging together like rivers, their individualities totally lost in the flow of dehumanized humanity. Again, the death of Coupeau could serve as a clinical description of a case of delirium tremens in its terminal stages. There is no doubt that Zola himself conceived the novel as documenting a medical experience. Yet even these clinical scenes, appropriately set in a charity hospital, are ultimately part of the novel’s “literariness.” The two affirmations can be reconciled through a study of the interplay of persons and styles in this excerpt, where interns express themselves scientifically, where Gervaise’s observations take the form of a colloquial and calmly painful inner discourse while Coupeau himself cries out his hallucinations and fears in the vilest of slangs, till death silences him. The signifier here carries surplus meaning intricately related to the referential meaning. Thus, while it could not be argued that in Zola’s novel, so laden with ideology and explicit as well as implicit social structures, literature is an “autonomous” expression of the human mind, it can yet clearly be shown to possess, among other functions, poetic function in Jakobson’s sense. The literariness of the text can be discovered amidst the relatedness of all its functions. When we say that literary history should be the history of literary works in their specificity, we do not imply that it should be considered divorced from other aspects of human experience and human history but that the moment of reflection upon literature – just as the moment of literary creation itself – should be viewed in isolation if only to ensure that in another phase its relatedness with

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other aspects of human experience can be understood. Thus the emphasis on the study of form can be perceived not as an escape from historicity but as a necessary limitation of problems, designed to make visible the time and space of literature. In the evolutionary and developmental views of literary history the contrary occurs: the literary work of art becomes reduced to factors outside or beyond itself, in the process of being explained by them. Thus Taine showed the literary work as the product of a race, a milieu, and a moment; it is the expression of the dominant attitude of its time – as if literary creation were subjected to a physical kind of determinism. Many decades later Texte, without in the least seeking the explanation of literary phenomena in anything external to the literary work, conceives – in the name of literature itself – a theory in which, once more, the individuality of works, and this time of entire national literatures, must give way to a supranational “logic,” to a historical development defined a priori (it is ironic that this theory already identified itself with comparative literature and in fact, in other ways, served it as a catalyst): “Because it was in the logic of things that, after having sufficiently compared, approached works of varying national origins, the European reading public, constantly increasing, will formulate a kind of common ideal, namely that of a literature whose advent we can hope for – or fear – and which will no longer be specifically English, German, French or Italian, but simply European” (Weisstein, 173). Literary history, then, was simply to follow this trend, as it was to follow the European cosmopolitanism and the disappearance of “local variants” predicted by Loliée. In such theories the future phase can be predicted, and this is what makes them both pseudo-scientific and historical. Another example of the tendency to reduce literary history to extraliterary factors is the doctrine expressed by Wilhelm Wetz. It is true that Wetz protects literary history from being dictated by predetermined critical norms and wants it to be consequent upon values arising from the psychology of every people, but this linking of literary history with folk psychology and the subordination of aesthetic evaluation to the latter are also threats to the specificity of literary history. “Aiming always at identifying characteristic traits, [comparative literary history] will, in studying an entire literature, primarily stress its national character; in the case of the literary genres, it will emphasize chiefly that in which they differ from the same forms as they are used in other countries. It will not be satisfied, however, with ascertaining facts but will also trace their causes, which are to be found in the intellectual and spiritual make-up of the different nations. It thus turns psychological and becomes capable of extracting from literature variable information about the national character” (Weisstein, 191).

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We have by now accumulated a sufficient number of samples of wrongly based systematization to show that it constitutes an epistemological impasse for literary history. Thus the past (but a past still lurking in certain present-day methodologies) offers us two types of extremes to be avoided in a renewed theory of literary historiography: a Lansonian, “fact-gathering” positivistic tendency, usually conducive to some form of the “genetic fallacy” with respect to individual works of art; and a dogmatic developmental tendency, which raises the genetic fallacy to the status of philosophical truth while its results in actual historiography carry consequences similar to those of the first tendency inasmuch as both ascribe extraliterary “causes” to literary creation. In the process of lifting from the past obvious examples of misconceptions that in themselves no longer matter today, except at the documentary level, we also uncover, however, reasons for which the historical approach itself is widely criticized or even abandoned, as if surgical removal of the diachronic dimension could automatically cleanse literary scholarship of all its past failings. The fact is that the process of weaving together synchronic and diachronic approaches is a far more demanding one than the simple exclusion of one or another of these categories. The healthy effect of formalist and structuralist approaches has been to force research to concentrate upon the inner workings of literary texts and upon relationships among their elements. But before denying the value of historicity itself as a dimension of literary study, we need to ascertain whether the text can be thoroughly analysed and understood with no reference whatsoever to its rooting in and differentiation from a literary tradition that itself exists within and interacts with a culture and a state of civilization. This discussion is often obscured by the fact that the “historicist” demands constant reference to context, whereas the sine qua non condition of historical soundness consists, minimally but importantly, only in avoiding that the setting of a problem be incorrectly based from a historical viewpoint. This could be rephrased more constructively by stating that in setting a problem a scholar should always situate it in his own mind with respect to the time to which his corpus belongs, with respect to neighbouring series in the literary spectrum, and also with respect to the preceding and subsequent series, whether or not he plans to deal with diachronic relationships. Thus studies of the Baroque metaphor presuppose historical definitions and decisions concerning periodization whether or not these are to appear explicitly in the resulting published work; and the latter may or may not concern itself with the cultural context, although it is indispensable that an awareness of the cultural context be absorbed in the work.

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In this attempt to redress the balance, in literary studies, between synchronic and diachronic considerations, it is also relevant to point out that in the structuralist reconstruction of the text, literary specificity becomes obscured in a manner that bears a certain resemblance to the genetic fallacy: in both cases a misplacement occurs, or at least may occur, inasmuch as the inquiry turns to selected sets of elements (whether internal or external) for their own sake rather than for the sake of discovering through them the inner coherence of the literary work. A renewed historiography, one cognizant of all the movements favouring intrinsic literary studies wherever they have occurred in the last century, cannot but take these studies into account in its rendering of the literary process in time. This poses problems of both an epistemological and a practical nature. From a practical viewpoint, especially if a comparative literary history is contemplated, the work required is immense because the historian must proceed inductively from the formal description of works and aspects of works to their interrelatedness in space and time. Brandt-Corstius, in his article entitled “Writing Histories of World Literature,” has shown the difficulty of this task and the rarity of success in the field. He points out that general histories of literature tend to be “histories of civilization or of the evolution of the human mind” (5) in which “literature proper is often subordinated to this broader purpose,” whereas for students of literature the true calling of literary history, and therefore the task of the literary historian, is to study literature as an aesthetic phenomenon; this implies that literary works must be seen in their uniqueness as well as in their relations with other literary works. Even in one period of one national literature the challenge of literary historiography is to avoid sacrificing uniqueness to categories but equally well to avoid using uniqueness as an alibi for not daring to synthesize. A fortiori, comparative literary history calls for vast syntheses requiring, in turn, a wealth of analyses and, on the basis of these, an inductive approach to the study of relationships among literary works. From this perspective, it is possible that global coverage of the literature of the world is a lesser priority for the immediate future than the solving of the methodological problem of correctly integrating the analytical and synthetic processes. This is not to say that such coverage is not urgent; one can only rejoice that the Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes undertaken by the International Comparative Literature Association systematically explores the literatures of Eastern as well as of Western Europe, or that the Pléiade Histoire des littératures edited by Raymond Queneau extends its panorama to the literatures of Asia. But comparative literary history is not a mere panorama; it attempts not only to describe but also to understand the linkage of liter-

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ary works among themselves, and in particular the relative stability of certain patterns or traditions, which are countered but thereby also reaffirmed, one might even say stabilized, by the innovations responding to them. Furthermore, comparative literary history, while centring upon transformations that occur from literary work to literary work or more precisely from feature to feature, also takes into account the successive readings of past works as another aspect of literary change; it is the works and readings together that beget a space of their own, today seen as “intertextuality.” Thus the practical problem of delimiting and describing what changes from work to work calls into question the very nature of change and even its possibility: if each work is unique, is not any attempt to associate any of its features with features in later or earlier works mere extrapolation? Can we do more than, as Croce would have it, write monographs about single works? The structuralist and semiotic concentration on synchronic systems or at least systems simulating synchrony removes the need to come to terms with the problem of change. In this respect we should not forget that the weight of the structuralist demonstration lies in the process of cognition itself rather than in the perception of its object (here the literary work of art) for its own sake. Thus the problem has been, so to say, suspended rather than altogether removed, all the more since more modern approaches to history (those of Aaron and Marrou, for example) also see the historia rerum gestarum as a cognitive process fundamentally different from the res gestae which it is the historian’s desire to reconstruct, knowing well that historiography cannot restitute the past wie es eigentlich gewesen, but rather that the cognizing subject’s reconstruction inscribes itself through its very subjectivity in a new objectivity that is the prehension (as Alfred North Whitehead would say) of an abolished past by the present in the guise of the historian rooted in a hic et nunc. That this is partly so in the case of the literary historian as well is selfevident – only partly, since the object of his study, the literary work, lives into the present, and yet can it be said to live in the same manner as it did at the time of its creation? Or is not critical study a reconstruction of the text, even if the text, materially, is there, as are the historian’s archival documents in “general” history? Thus, were it not that structuralist thought progressed at first by its emphasis on synchronic relations, the analogy between its cognitive processes and those of the practising modern historian would be more clearly apparent. Concerning Lévi-Strauss for example, Fredric Jameson points out: “As for structuralism, who could claim that a thinker like Lévi-Strauss, thanks to whom the apparently outmoded reflections of Rousseau on the state of nature and the social contract have once more become the order of

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the day; thanks to whom, in the midst of a stifling and artificial civilization, the meditation on the very origins of culture has been reawakened – has not made an impact on our thinking about history? If structuralism has any ultimate and privileged field of study, it may well be found in the history of ideas conceived in a new and rigorous fashion” (11). Jameson sees no contradiction between diachronic and synchronic approaches; in fact, he sees them as mutually productive, and within the same systems, but he shows that in order to make this perspective workable we must go beyond the rather mechanical concept of evolution permitted by Russian formalism, and rediscover temporality itself: “To say that synchronic systems cannot deal in any adequate conceptual way with temporal phenomena is not to say that we do not emerge with a heightened sense of the mystery of diachrony itself. We have tended to take temporality for granted; where everything is historical the idea of history itself seems empty of content. Perhaps that is indeed the ultimate propaedeutic value of the linguistic model; to renew our fascination with the seeds of time” (11). A renewed understanding of temporality would give sounder philosophical foundations to literary history and change its emphasis. In the study of traditions and conventions for example, instead of focusing upon the original model and upon the regularity and stability of its evolution despite time, so to say, the historian would emphasize the dynamics of change. The emphasis, then, is not (or at least not as exclusively as has been the practice) on the preservation of the original model but on its transformations, on the manner in which it differentiates itself from the original model but also from more recent ones. The time element in this conception is not merely a chronological container or series of them housing the successive models (for in the latter conception all that is implied is that model B differs from model A which preceded it, and time is a mere abstraction). It is, far more positively, the entire field of interrelationships (intraliterary and extraliterary and those between literature and other areas of human activity) at a given moment of history – a moment of the becoming of mankind. The difficulty this statement raises is that it might be deemed deterministic if construed as meaning that an individual work, or a whole trend for that matter, could not differ significantly from the predominant literary manifestations of the period. But such an objection would itself rest on an abstract and oversimplified conception of what a moment of history is, by which I mean not merely its visibly dominant characteristics but also survivals of past moments and prefigurations of moments to come, both, in a sense, existing as protests against that which is then predominant. Time is then no longer a container empty of content but the fullness of all that is, interacting with

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the creator who himself partakes of the moment; and, while as creator he transcends it, the mode and degree of transcendence of which he is capable is itself part and parcel of the moment in question (Lucien Febvre’s exemplary demonstration of the nature and limits of unbelief in sixteenth-century France as they affect the religious attitudes of Rabelais shows the creator’s time at work upon him – and him upon it – in this sense). If we take as example the field of the modern mythological drama, we see that a purely thematological approach, at any rate one that would regard various dramatic versions of the same myth as variations upon a musical theme, eludes the historical problem; it acknowledges of course that the variations occur in time, but sequential placing in time does not really differ from synchronic juxtaposition unless the workings of time are shown – that is, unless the sequence itself is meaningful – and unless the historian or critic, in her study of the sequence, is historically minded – that is, able to perceive the dynamic nature of the transformations of the theme. This implies that she understands the dramatist to have reached a new integration of matter and form and created a new aesthetic entity rather than simply to have departed from a classical norm. In this respect it could be said that playwrights who accept the creative constraint of a classical myth vary in their perception of that constraint and its role. Cocteau even provides, among his plays, two extremes of that perception: those found respectively in Oedipe-Roi and in La Machine infernale. The former play is in every respect a French version of Oedipus Rex; Cocteau’s intervention consists merely (as it does in his Antigone) in quickening the pace of his ancient model. La Machine infernale, by contrast, consists of an entire network of rich and complex departures from Sophocles, in the matter of characters (a young, attractive Sphinx); of style (Queen Jocasta addressing Tiresias as Zizi); of symbolization (the barely disguised sexual fantasies of Oedipus and Jocasta). There are even slips of the tongue that directly enact Cocteau’s acknowledgment of Freud’s ideas in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life. If the writer himself sees the meaning and the possibility of transformations – in this case of combining known mythemes with new mythologems – a fortiori the literary historian must acquire a sense for detecting transformations. This approach contrasts with that of Gilbert Highet in The Classical Tradition. Chapter 23 of this work contains a reasoned and comprehensive account of the manner in which modern dramatists revived Greek mythology in the twentieth century, and more particularly of the use of Greek mythology in the European drama of the entre-deuxguerres. In order to show the difference between Highet’s approach and that suggested here it is necessary to quote him at some length

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and to observe his choice of words: “All of these authors are eager to keep their plays from being remote, archaic, unreal. Therefore, although they do not deliberately put anachronisms on the stage, they make the language as modern as they can, and frequently lapse into vulgarities of detail and expression” (573). The term anachronism is significant. It means, in the spirit of Highet’s entire study, that there exists a tradition in which the true image of Greek myths is preserved, and that any step away from the original form, meaning, atmosphere, is anachronistic. Now, if this simply means that there is adaptation to the literary and particularly stylistic taste of the modern period, the author is merely stating the obvious. Conceivably, however, he uses anachronism in a negative and even derogatory sense to designate a substantive change in the direction of unfaithfulness to the “original.” This is of course where Highet’s approach to historiography in this particular field can be questioned. If it is true that, as Harry Levine states, all accretions to the myth belong to it (which ultimately means, we might add, that they are not accretions at all but equivalent structural elements arising at various dates so that we can see them, as LéviStrauss shows, in a kind of synchronic coexistence), then what appears at first glance to be an extraneous addition may in fact be the functional transformation of an element pre-existing in a former version of the myth. While Highet would depict the transformation as a departure from the original, a more deeply historical manner of viewing the transformation would be to regard it, in every case, as a new formal manifestation of a function that is permanently inherent in the myth. The ominous family resemblance of all the Mannons in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra is a post-Freudian equivalent of the ancient blood curse upon the Atreides. It must be remembered that the playwright who explicitly or implicitly chooses to revive a classical myth expects the audience to have some knowledge of the myth; he counts upon the surprise effect of innovations to make the myth alive again. Thus elements that to Highet spell eccentricity – the horse, the poetic competition, and the word merde (abbreviation for “Madame Eurydice reviendra des Enfers”) spelt by the horse’s hoof, in Cocteau’s Orphée; the coarse conversations about getting drunk and going to a house of ill-repute in Anouilh’s Antigone; or the insane violence of all female characters in Hofmannsthal’s Elektra – all these should rather be viewed from Harry Levine’s point of view as accretions that truly – that is, structurally and functionally – belong. Thus Highet’s conclusion concerning the presence of mythology in modern European literature sounds strangely ahistorical, though the purpose of the entire study is historical: “We opened this discussion by asking why these playwrights chose Greek legends for their subjects.

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The central answer is that the myths are permanent. They deal with the greatest of all problems, the problems which do not change because men and women do not change” (573). Paradoxically, the historian left out the element of temporality, which welds together aesthetic renewal with the ontological permanence or at least the “éternel retour” of human situations. If, however, the resurgence of myths in literature is viewed in the perspective of temporality, the myths reveal themselves as structures endowed with all the characteristics attributed to structures by Piaget: “En première approximation une structure est un système de transformations qui compte des lois en tant que système … et qui se conserve ou s’enrichit par le jeu même de ses transformations sans que celles-ci aboutissent en dehors de ses frontières ou fassent appel à des éléments extérieurs. En un mot, une structure comprend ainsi les trois caractères do totalité, de transformation et d’auto-réglage” (6–7). Thus, in mythological drama, myths tend to act as structures by reclaiming their totality, and they do so precisely through the process of transformation in time, which in a new dramatic version will replace one function by another, more susceptible to bringing together the grammar of myth and that of drama in an aesthetically successful manner – that is, so as to bring about a highly conscious collision of past and present. That which in a rather poetic way has been called by the critics the power of the myth to survive or revive – but which somehow is never explained – may thus be due to its reality amidst “structures de l’imaginaire” – that is, to a built-in pathway that is not the invention of the dramatist but acts as creative constraint upon his inventiveness. The problem is partly, as it would be in other studies of structures, that of the relationship between the mind of the researcher and the reality to be encompassed and organized by him or her. If structures are organized wholes, as opposed to mere aggregates, and if they unfold in diachrony as well as in synchrony, a structural epistemology (whatever the discipline, and why not literary history?) must underlie the uncovering of such organized wholes and the modes of association among their elements. Structuralism has drawn attention to the presence of these wholes, as pragmatic tools rather than entities in the Platonic sense. Overextending the concept of structure and imposing one’s “models” upon the phenomena to be described may lead to another form of the fallacy of misplacement that I described earlier in some of its historical forms, and to confusion between structure and system. There is a subtle but vital difference between what is latently there, structures itself by self-regulation, and becomes material for structuring at a higher epistemological level by the beholder, and the imposition of systems upon reality by the beholder. A renewed historiography

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must be based on formal descriptions of systems of features and literary devices as they evolve through time, rather than on any sort of a priori. When assessing the structuralist contribution to the study of literature, we should remember that although Lévi-Strauss lashes out at historical approaches in the form of functionalism, which is a cumbersome impediment to the anthropologist, he does not deny the existence of diachronic structures, and writes, in fact, that “en droit et en fait il existe des structures diachroniques et des structures synchroniques” (cf Piaget, 91). Explicitly in La Pensée sauvage he asserts the value of history, which is “indispensable pour inventorier l’intégralité des éléments d’une structure quelconque, humaine ou non humaine. Loin donc que la recherche de l’intelligibilité aboutisse à l’histoire comme à son point d’arrivée, c’est l’histoire qui sert de point de départ pour la quête de l’intelligibilité … L’histoire mène à tout, mais à condition d’en sortir” (347–8). Whether the possibility of a re-evaluation of the historical order in a structuralist perspective has anything to offer the historian of literature depends a great deal upon what, in the end, is thought to account most deeply for the specificity of the literary work of art. If the inner arrangement of the features of the work is its inalienable property and makes it unique, nothing prevents the historian from appraising the impact of traditions and conventions upon that arrangement and the selection of those features. In fact, knowledge of this dialectic would in every instance ensure a balanced integration of synchronic and diachronic elements and lead to situating the work fruitfully in a wider segment of history. Thus history would no longer serve as Ersatz for analysis but as a living medium from which works are temporarily withdrawn for purposes of analysis. “En définitive la possibilité des sciences de l’homme reposerait sur la possibilité de découvrir des lois de fonctionnement, d’évolution et de correspondance interne des structures sociales, donc sur la généralisation de la méthode d’analyse structurale devenue capable d’expliquer les conditions de variation et d’évolution des structures et de leurs fonctions” (Piaget, 103). Nothing precludes this possibility from also disclosing itself in the field of culture and more particularly of literature, but it is all the more necessary in that case to insist, as does Piaget in commenting upon this quotation, where Godelier interprets Althusser’s thought on Marx, on the necessity of refining the tools of structural analysis. Refining the tools of analysis of the literary historian is perhaps all that is needed to answer effectively the severe scrutiny that the discipline undergoes in René Wellek’s text “The Fall of Literary History.” Atomistic factualism and the resulting inconsequential antiquarianism, uncritical scientism, and a general lack of focus in historical re-

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search upon literature; more particularly yet the failure to distinguish sufficiently between the history of literature and general history – these are the factors upon which Wellek’s analysis of the weaknesses of literary history as it has been practised is based. My introductory remarks related directly to these by now well-known pitfalls on the path of the literary historian. But having succeeded in avoiding these, where will modern literary historians aim? Will they disperse their activity, as Croce would have it, in a series of monographs of an aesthetic nature and thus elude the problem of influences upon and among works of literature? Will they, like the phenomenologist, demonstrate the qualities of the literary work rather than explain its antecedents? Will they bring literary historiography into coincidence with general historiography? (In this respect, Wellek felt that the young Lukács provides no real alternative to this outcome with his idea of literature as “reflection of society,” since the reflection is linked with that which it reflects in too deterministic a manner.) None of these solutions would provide a solid basis for an epistemology of literary history. There is, according to Wellek, a path along which literary history can gain a new identity and stature: “What is needed is a modern concept of time, modelled on an interpenetration of the causal order in experience and memory. A work of art is not simply a member of a series, a link in a chain. It may stand in relation to anything in the past. It is not only a structure which may be analysed descriptively. It is a totality of values [… that] can be grasped only in an act of contemplation. These values are created in a free act of the imagination irreducible to limiting conditions in sources, traditions, biographical and social circumstances.” Earlier I referred to the continuous present (and presence) of the literary work, which makes it so different from, say, the archival source of the historian: the literary work is directly accessible to writers not only of the generation following that in which it was written but many generations later as well, so that, as Wellek suggests, there can never be a merely causal and sequential linkage between the existence of one work of art and the production of another that follows it in time. Far more important is the “interpenetration … in experience and memory” that, like Proust’s temps retrouvé is a concept of time in which time is the locus of a meeting of minds, a dynamic and undetermined reality rather than a quantity delimiting the exchange between them. While the role of the individual imagination and of the freedom with which it expresses itself in the individual work of art cannot be overemphasized, and while the values of which Wellek speaks reside in that very uniqueness, it should also be said that integration in (or reaction against) a tradition, and all the other ways literary works have of

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relating to one another in time, detract nothing from those values. In fact, it may be argued that these values only exist by dint of their historical embodiment, in which the individual imagination responds to the past corpus and to the surrounding world of which the corpus of literature is a living part (living, that is, capable of change in every new perception). As Claudio Guillén has pointed out in Literature as System, the succession of literary works in time has in fact demonstrated a high degree of stability and continuity, and the pattern of formal recurrences (historically and geographically) has been remarkable: genres and modes are not merely realities based upon well-recognized, quasi-universal aesthetic categories. They have happened and have formed, over time, highly resilient continuities related among themselves; they have a structural existence. What the modern historian must do is to view them as vortices of possibilities from which the new, the as yet uncreated will arise, not as a consequence but as a response. Turning-points, transformations, avant-garde movements are “protests” (H.R. Jauss), not only because new works contradict the old, thereby extending the very traditions they intend to transform, but because new readings of older works add a dimension to the literary history of a period, in fact belong to it, in a renewed manner, rather than to the period in which they were created. Synchronic and diachronic approaches will seem incompatible only if the historian places or rather misplaces his entire faith in a static phase of either, and disregards their dialectic within the history of the humanities.

works cited Brandt-Corstius, J. “Writing histories of world literatures.” In Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 1963, vol. 12. Guillén, Claudio. Literature as System. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971. Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1949. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. La Pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon 1962. Lohner, Eric. The Intrinsic Method: Some Reconsiderations. In The Disciplines of criticism, ed. Peter Demetz et al. New Haven: Yale University Press 1968. Piaget, Jean. Le Structuralisme. Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1970. Weisstein, Ulrich. Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1973. Wellek, René. “The Fall of Literary History.” In Actes du vi e Congrès de ailc. Stuttgart: Kunst und Wissen 1975.

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8 From “Time Lost” to “Time Regained” in Literary History

The Proustian origin of this title requires no explanation. It expresses a set of creative tensions: the time that is lost is that of life lived and spent in the instant – raw, yet infinitely rich and complex material for retrieval in memory. To live is forever to transform experience into memory; and even this statement oversimplifies, inasmuch as memory re-enters experience and adds to the given that is to be transformed. Proust’s characters reawaken, through reminiscence nourished by insistent sensorial signals, time, or life, that is past: cette réalité loin de laquelle nous vivons, de laquelle nous nous écartons de plus en plus au fur et à mesure que prend plus d’épaisseur et d’imperméabilité la connaissance conventionnelle que nous lui substituons, cette réalité que nous risquerions fort de mourir sans avoir connue, et qui est tout simplement notre vie. (1986, 289)

Then comes a second opposition, that between life and art. Transformation of life into memory opens the way to a process of internalization, of changing the fleeting into the more perennial (assuming, that is, that memories are less fragile than events, and in Proust’s sense they are, as memory has the power to recall them again and again from

Guest lecture at the Institute of Human Values, St Mary’s University, Nov. 1984. Chapter in Aesthetics and the Literature of Ideas, Essays in Honour of A. Owen Aldridge, ed. F. Jost (Newark: University of Delaware Press 1990), 66–75.

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their unconscious abode). Without going so far as to say that Proust added greater value to what is relived than to what was lived, let us say that what was lived regains value in retrospect through the magic lantern – itself a Proustian image – of memory. Furthermore, art is also reconstruction in this sense, and if we follow Proust’s vision, art is more true to life than life itself, or even the memory of life: La vraie vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent réellement vécue, c’est la littérature; cette vie qui, en un sens, habite à chaque instant chez tous les hommes aussi bien que chez l’artiste. Mais ils ne la voient pas, parce qu’ils ne cherchent pas à l’éclaircir. (289)

“Éclaircir” is the most meaningful term here. Art brings life from an unanalysed to an analysed state. It is vision, and it is only to the extent that this vision can express itself meaningfully to others that it can be communicated. Whereas experience can never be adequately communicated, its artistic expression, because it is indirect and symbolical, does get across to others that which without art would, as Proust says, eternally remain the secret of each human being. For each human being only possesses one world, his or her own; art opens up a multiplicity of possible worlds (which brings us close to certain present-day philosophies of literature that explore the logic of possible narrative worlds). And so art is life abundant, in contrast with the measured practicality of everyday living. Proust himself and his commentators have of course capitalized upon the contrast between this vision of life and art, and realism, which seeks merely to copy life. Today we tend to be more aware of the deeply reconstructive meaning of realism and naturalism, even beyond the semantic variations these terms evoke in different languages. No longer do we accuse the realistic artist of “merely” being a mechanical recorder of life; after all, photography today is also considered an art, though different from non-representational and even representational painting, because it implies viewpoint and composition. All art, whatever the medium, pertains to time regained, in the Proustian sense. History, finally, is of life and of art, and sometimes of their relationships. Without presuming that Proust ever carried his reflections into the domain of the history of literature, we can use time lost and time retrieved as similes to structure a discussion upon the nature of literary history, many of whose problems seem to stem from a lack of understanding of the distance between time lost and time regained, as well as from confusion about what it is that literary history records. First there is the interface between the history within which literary texts

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are written and the texts themselves. Much of the so-called crisis in literary studies, with its questioning of literary history as a discipline, came from the fact that the latter was all too often confined to the external relationships of literature. But if we focus for a moment upon that contextual rooting in the history of mankind that involves the social and cultural determinants of works and even their economic infrastructure, the lives of authors among their contemporaries, and the specific circumstances of the production of works that may (or may not, for history also imparts a sense of limits and teaches us what could not possibly have been the case, given a set of factors) have contributed to their psychological and/or societal genesis, we realize that defining history as such was never a simple matter. Those who criticized the “positivism” of literary history often assumed – with excellent justification, given a large section of the material at hand – that to reflect upon the conditioning of literary works by their historical context was to deny their specificity and also their potential for timelessness. There was a fear that in searching for res gestae historians would never attain the level of historia rerum gestarum: that in fact they ignored the distance between time lost and time regained both in the literary works that are the objects of literary history and in literary historiography itself. Stemming from such movements as New Criticism and Nouvelle critique, many voices were raised to point out that literary history mismanages its object if it confuses it with factors unrelated to the freedom of the creative writer, and may, if it treats those factors as causes of his or her work, distort its nature and fail to account for it. There ensued a variety of approaches that were considered “intrinsic” rather than historical in the sense to which I have alluded. This trend must be viewed in perspective: the reaction was not – although those who were immersed in it did not realize it at the time – directed against literary history itself so much as against a distortion of it. In France one form of this distortion was associated with the name of Gustave Lanson and, more relevantly perhaps, his disciples. Lanson himself, in a wellknown essay on methodology, points to the many forms of inquiry that are auxiliary disciplines, not literary history proper (1965). In Germany, Geistesgeschichte was a form of subjection of the literary work to cultural activity at large that in turn was a function of the spirit of a nation. Thus criticisms were aimed at practices that misrepresented the potential of literary history. They were useful inasmuch as they impelled literary history to turn inward and look upon itself as a creative humanistic activity in its own right rather than as a mechanical reconstruction of things past. Yet the kinds of vision of literary history to which the criticisms reacted were delayed products of nineteenthcentury positivism and evolutionism. They existed, however, and we

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should not ignore the fact that Taine, for example, studied the literature of England as one studies physics, with a terminology that gave physical factors such as climate absolute power of causation and determinacy. Biological evolutionary theory also took its toll in that the theory of genre, when it was first developed, for example, by Brunetière, approached literary works as if they had been individuals in a species, their characteristics being of necessity determined by those of the species, some of them being mutants within the species when the time was ripe. Friedrich Schlegel, in his lectures on literary history (1878), treats it as a function of the historical evolution of mankind: the same necessity that impels nations towards greatness and decline makes certain genres dominant at certain times in certain countries: thus the Greek epic. Obversely, of course, genres that are not at the peak of the wave are viewed as minor subjects (just as Hegel obliterates or “telescopes” the history of entire nations and continents when they are not visited by the Zeitgeist). In the nineteenth century and even in recent decades literary history has been beset by different but similarly unanalysed historicist assumptions. Among countless possible illustrations we may draw from a work that in many ways is valuable: Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition (1957), which studies the impact of classical Greece and Rome upon the literatures of Europe. Here is an excerpt exemplifying the author’s treatment of literary inheritance: Surely, Dorian Gray is the elder brother of Gide’s Immoraliste? There is much in Gide which was not in Wilde, and there was something in Wilde which is not in Gide. Yet the two had many characteristics in common, including their strangest and their strongest. (526)

The formulation is vague, suggesting links without any systematic demonstration of them. In a paper entitled “The Fall of Literary History” (1976) René Wellek gave three reasons for the theoretical and methodological weakness of literary history as practised: “general dissatisfaction with what could be called the atomistic factualism of much literary scholarship and the resultant inconsequential antiquarianism”; the “uncritical scientism which pretends to establish causal relationships and provide causal explanations by a listing of parallels between works of literature or by correlations between events in the life of a poet and the themes or figures of his work”; and a general lack of focus in the practice of literary history. It is perhaps this third aspect of Wellek’s criticism that has had the deepest implications and has given literary scholars the most cause for

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reflection, since what he called lack of focus was in fact a lack of epistemological awareness both of history itself and of its relationship to literature. Historians of history and historiography, as well as philosophers of history, are aware of all the variations that have taken place with regard to the understanding of the knowledge of things past; they know that these variations are themselves part of history. Croce’s reaction against Hegelianism and its systematic reduction of the individual to the collective, on the ground that the individual fulfils itself in the collective, is a case in point. Croce in fact would not admit of generalization in literary scholarship, so that the only form of literary historiography that he would allow without indignation is the study of the individual author and work. Moreover, literary historians have been, by and large, unaware of evolution in the area of philosophy of history, and more specifically of the extent to which the cognitive act in history is thought to be conditioned by the vision and activity of the investigator’s mind. In particular, Aaron and Marrou in France and Collingwood in England have shown the extent to which history is re-creation rather than just reconstruction of past events. In this respect Collingwood sounds quite Proustian when he says in The Idea of History (1946): How, or on what conditions, can the historian know the past? In considering this question, the first point to notice is that the past is never a given fact which he can apprehend empirically by perception. Ex hypothesi the historian is not an eyewitness of the events he desires to know […] If then the historian has no direct or empirical knowledge of his facts, and no transmitted or testimoniary knowledge of them what kind of knowledge has he; in other words, what must the historian do in order that he may know them? […] My historical review of the idea of history has resulted in the emergence of an answer to this question: namely, that the historian must reenact the past in his own mind. (282)

Collingwood then goes on to show that immediacy in the flow of consciousness and mediation between the thinker and his context are not mutually exclusive but co-present: “Every act of thought, as it actually happens, happens in a context out of which it arises and in which it lives, like any other experience, as an organic part of the thinker’s life” (300). In other words, rethinking Plato or Montaigne or Proust is obliterating neither the experience of the reader or the text; it is a living contact of two minds through the text. Potentially every critique or history is radically new, even if it deals with a work or sequence of events already analysed by others: it is the renewed vision that contributes to the advancement of knowledge (and exemplifies its own time and society relating to the society and time of the past); it is not a précis

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of works or phenomena that would somehow remain valid once and for all. Obviously, while Collingwood discusses primarily the work of the historian, we are drawing parallels with that of the literary historian. “Of what,” asks Collingwood, “can there be historical knowledge? Of that which can be reenacted in the historian’s mind. In the first place, this must be experience. Of that which is not experience by mere object of experience there can be no history” (302). It is not difficult to see that Collingwood reacts against systematic philosophies of history such as those of Vico, Hegel, or Marx, with their respective triadic processes. There is, moreover, a parallelism between Collingwood’s emphasis on the epistemological aspect of history and the routinely sounded warnings, with respect to literary history, against systems that lock the becoming of literature into the patterns of general history. To question such systems is not undue subjectivism; it is simply to accept that historical systems themselves are mental constructs, and that those that deal with literature without taking into account its specific nature are inadequate tools. Two particular forms of subjection of literary history have been frequent sources of distortion. The first relates to periodization. We speak of Elizabethan drama, of the Victorian novel, of the Neoclassicism of the “siècle de Louis xiv” without even stopping to think that we are designing, for sets of literary works, chronological periods that are those of political history, as if such categories could account for the characteristics of the literary works themselves. This in turn raises the question whether periodization, even if freed of such political elements, ever does justice to the individuality of works, notably those that seem to defy all periodization because they seem to break loose of their time. Lautréamont can be perceived as foreshadowing surrealism. But speculation on chronological categories and their limitations and failings serves to illustrate their inadequacy and the nature of this inadequacy as a basis for interpretation. There is nothing wrong with ordering works of literature into categories, synchronic or diachronic, as long as we do not extrapolate from using them as working hypotheses to installing them as ultimate truths. This points to an inductive approach such as that attempted in L’Avènement de l’esprit nouveau (1400–1480) (1988). In considering a given phenomenon it is never taken for granted that a turning-point called Renaissance occurs of necessity in a given chronological section. An exploration of the development of satire between 1400 and 1480, for example, shows that in most national literatures of Europe, satirical forms and the satirical spirit remained closely associated with medieval themes and habits of mind, and that the humanist use of formal satire in the classical sense has little impact elsewhere within the period. In-

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creasingly, the concept of Renaissance itself is considered problematic when predicated too narrowly upon the Italian or French model: throughout Europe there are marked chronological divergences in the unfolding of the main functions usually associated with the Renaissance concept, and it cannot be said that they all fulfil themselves, across the board, even before the end of the seventeenth century, whether one thinks of the rediscovery of classical antiquity, of the development of vernaculars into literary languages, of the development of literary awareness, of the philological practices and moral stances of humanism, of the rise of the bourgeoisie and of nationalism, or of the expansion of knowledge about this planet and the universe. The other possible form of subjection of literary history to general history (or more probably a distortion of it) is the frequent attempt to treat as one the study of literature and of intellectual history, which leads to neglecting the primacy of form. Against this attitude Helmut Hatzfeld asserts that “the stylistic form of the motif is more important for deciding an epoch than the topos as such. From this fundamental distinction it seems rather clear that an epoch can be defined only by its style” (80). Hatzfeld did not claim that content should be forgotten but that the ultimate criterion in literary periodization must be sought not in content analysis but in the study of form, taking stylistic facts as indicators. Thus the baroque metaphor is an excellent tool for the definition and circumscribing of baroque literature in a given country, as distinct from the Renaissance style that precedes it. Ernst Robert Curtius, by contrast, uses as indicator the topos, which Hatzfeld distrusts. Curtius’s preference does not mean that he favours criteria of content as opposed to form but that topoi are in his eyes important intersections of form and meaning. Take as an example his treatment of the Muses in the Latin Middle Ages: Among the concrete formal constants of literary tradition are the Muses. In the view of Antiquity, they belong not only to poetry but to all higher forms of intellectual life besides. To live with the Muses means to live humanistically … For us the Muses are shadowy figures of a tradition that has long since had its day. But once they were vital forces. Every page in the history of European literature speaks of them. (228)

But this is precisely the point: they are present at all times as symbols of artistic and intellectual activity, but the mode of their representation changes, and it is in fact the mode of representation that lies at the heart of the differential between literary and general history, or rather their respective objects.

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It might be retorted that to insist on the specificity of the literary work of art as residing in its formal aspects is to go from a falsely historicist extreme to another extreme. This is a legitimate objection. Without necessarily endorsing Hatzfeld’s and other formalistic views, it is important to understand the factors leading to the massive movement of “intrinsic” studies that desolidarized themselves from the sort of “positivism” and “factualism” Wellek condemns. A wealth of immanentist studies, of which Russian formalism and American New Criticism were part, long preceded Wellek’s invitation to literary history to cultivate a greater awareness of itself and of its true object. Nor can it be said that New Criticism, for instance, was ahistorical: the wider context of the work under examination was constantly implied. It was never forgotten that the literary work is conceived and written within history and that its concretization by the reader and its reconstruction or deconstruction by the critic or theoretician occurs in history. At any rate, those who have drawn attention to that which, in the literary work, is not altogether time-bound have endowed literary studies with a phase of concentration upon the structure of the literary works themselves. It may be that this phase demands a suspension of historical probings, but only inasmuch as the synchronic implies the diachronic and as the cognitive act of criticism, though its results stand on their own, nevertheless is rooted in a culture and society, as is the work criticized. Should we not credit genetic structuralism, for instance, with showing that literary structures in the “purest” sense, such as the problematic hero or the labyrinth figure, are deeply related to the structures of society? This was Goldmann’s (as it had been Lukács’) response to the naïvely contextualistic theories of aesthetics within Marxism that considered the work of art to mirror states of society and denied the work of art or of literature a specificity of its own; yet there has been, even within Marxism, later substantial consensus on such a specificity as long as this concept does not entail some kind of ontological autonomy, self-subsistence, or priority. If all this is taken into account, there can be positive reappraisal of historicism such as we find in Historicism Once More by Roy Harvey Pearce (1969): We must therefore consider the literary work as it is a kind of statement, which can never be dissociated from either the time in which it was made or the time in which it is known; i.e. when the work was written or when it was (or is) read … The literary work is thus, as we say, not “true”; it consists of a series of hypothetical situations, imagined and motivated in such a way that, within their confines, we can accept as necessary the actions and responses into which the situations – and the imagined human beings in them – are made to

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issue … A literary work is thus sui generis a densely particularized expression of what I can only call humanitas. (26)

Since our humanitas involves both our individual self and our accultured, social nature, literature arises from and caters to both these aspects. So should the study of literature also account for them both, and the configuration of theories and methodologies must be broad enough to account for them globally, though individual scholars tend to work at one or the other end of the spectrum. This is not emphasized often enough: most of the current approaches to literature are not fundamentally incompatible with one another, though a few are. All should be regarded as moments of concentration, synchronically or diachronically conceived, on a work or set of works; and their potential intervention in a more holistic theory of discourse should also be taken into account, but that is another exercise yet. Sociocriticism does not exclude but presupposes history. Formalist analysis, which would appear to evacuate contextual considerations form its field of vision, did so initially in response to a historical situation: the Russian Revolution and the consequent dominance of the Marxist doctrine that threatened, unless counteracted, to undermine the specificity of the literary work. Thus formalism carries with it its own historical explanation, not to mention the fact that alongside its phonological, prosodic, and semantic studies it also generated its own history of genre and form by dint of Tynianov’s concept of evolution. That forms generate forms is also an implication of Lotman’s secondary modelling system, which has its own existence within its own duration, though ontologically, in keeping with the Marxist view, that existence and that duration owe their ultimate determination to the world of matter as manifested in the economic infrastructure. The defence of the specificity of the literary work owes much to Ingarden, for whom it dominated every other factor of literary theory, and to Dilthey, who emphasized less the poeticity of the work than that of the experience that gives rise to it (which again raises our initial question of the relationship, in the work of art, of time lost and time regained). Ingarden also re-enters the historical world of experience when describing the moment at which the reader appropriates the text. Thus the timeless and the time-bound are constantly, in the study of literature, in a state of mutual – and dynamic – dialectical tension. Finally, let us remember that in terms of the epistemology of various disciplines, literary scholarship is by no means the only field in which the historical approach has been reappraised. In his studies on patterns of kinship in primitive societies Lévi-Strauss used a synchronic

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approach not because he condemned longitudinal studies but because of the economy and practicality afforded by concentrating upon a chronological section. This meant dispensing with the description of many adventitious surface elements in order to bring to light the permanent, deeper structures of the anthropological object at hand. Why was the impact of cultural anthropology (as well as of other social sciences) upon literary studies, particularly in France in the fifties and sixties, thought to be totally incompatible with a historical approach to literature? First, structural analysis seemed to demand a reduction of its object to fit an abstract model, and thus to destroy the uniqueness of the literary work, a uniqueness deeply bound up with its unfolding in time. Secondly, the aesthetic qualities of the literary work seemed to elude the model obtained. Both objections were in fact valid, and both bear witness to the inadvisability of extrapolating methodologies directly from one field to another. One of Lévi-Strauss’s great intuitions was to consider myths as languages whose segments were functions; the same is true of Propp’s “situations.” Thus direct applications of their models to literary works might perhaps have endowed these with a scientific appearance but at the expense of their literary characteristics and their specific personalities as literary works. To the extent that narratology began to pattern itself after cultural anthropology and linguistics, it too ran the risk of sacrificing object to method. What was less obvious then but has become increasingly striking since is that these experiments have been impelling literary scholarship to concentrate on the structuring and destructuring of forms in order that their full spectrum may be known, named, and studied in such a way that the full potential of literature as a treasure-house of models of communication may be made manifest. Such inventories then become tools of a renewed literary historiography, attentive not only to the occurrence of forms but to their transformations and to the patterns of their transformations, attentive also to the production of meaning and its transformations. A new history of, say, contemporary poetry is not one in which the works of individual poets would lose their distinguishing features. These, however, would not be closely linked with the poets’ biographies and intentionalities but would be linked to one another and to the works of other authors of their time and of the relevant past through sets of formal specific interrelationships that would make them truly comparable, and by dint of comparison of precise structures and sets of structures would reveal the uniqueness of each work and of each poetic vision within the spectrum of twentieth-century poetry. It is possible, if such a history ever comes about, that time re-

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gained in poetry will reawaken the longing of the historian for the knowledge of the personal sources of poetic vision.

works cited Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1946. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper and Row 1963. Hatzfeld, Helmut. “Comparative Literature as a Necessary Model.” In Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. P. Demetz, T. Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. New Haven: Yale University Press 1968. Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press 1957. Klaniczay, Tibor, Eva Kushner, and André Stegmann, eds. L’Avènement de l’esprit nouveau (1400–1480). Renaissance vol. 1 of Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó 1988. Lanson, Gustave. “La Méthode de l’histoire littéraire.” In Essais de méthode, de critique et d’histoire littéraire, ed. Henri Peyre. Paris: Hachette 1965. Pearce, Roy Harvey. Historicism Once More. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1969. Proust, Marcel. Le Temps retrouvé. Vol. 8 of À la recherche du temps perdu. Ed. Jean Milly. Paris: Flammarion 1986. von Schlegel, Friedrich. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern. Ed. John Frost. Philadelphia: Moss 1848. Wellek, René. “The Fall of Literary History.” In Proceedings of the 6th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. Milan Dimi´c and Miklós Szábolcsi. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó 1976.

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9 On Renaissance Literary Historiography

This essay is devoted to a living experiment in early modern literary historiography – the Renaissance part, in four volumes, of the Comparative History of Literature in European Languages – and more particularly to the theoretical and methodological aspects of the project. Though this may be implicit in the very nature of the entire series and not only its Renaissance volumes, it should be pointed out that both bear witness to the permanence of literary history within literary scholarship and to the determination of a group of scholars to renew literary history in the light of recent theoretical thought. Obviously this does not go as far as agreeing with the deconstructivist distrust of any general construct, be it synchronic or diachronic, for fear of dogmatic fixations. It does, however, imply a degree of such distrust for reasons relating to the respect of history rather than to its undoing. Thus, “new” literary historians will naturally react against the insufficiencies and superficialities of the approaches described by Wellek (1970) and many others as genetic, positivistic, or both. They will wish to avail themselves of the inexhaustible resources of the past while well aware that the past as res gestae has receded into the unknowable. Thus they will tend to draw upon it as a set of correlates within which to situate a text or texts so as to avoid material errors in interpretation,

Paper read at the Modern Language Association of America, Dec. 1982. Chapter in Sensus communis: Panorama de la situation actuelle en littérature comparée. Festschrift für Henry Remak (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag 1986), 139–44.

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rather than as a set of factual truths. They will be particularly attentive to texts and to their relationships among themselves, without neglecting the conditions of their production and of their reception. Once it is understood that the kind of validation that is required of literary history differs from that required in the case of general history – since the former builds upon a body of evidence that consists of the literary texts themselves and to a large extent is already available, though often it may come to be modified in the research process – expectations about the exact nature of its reliability or scientificity also begin to change. The problem then is no longer the need for literary history to seek epistemological and theoretical validity in a Janus-like quest of respectability in the eyes both of history itself and of theory. With respect to theory, literary history will claim recognition of its own specificity once the inductive nature of its processes is clearly accepted and incorporated into the description of literary systems. (Whether this disqualifies it for the kind of validity expected of the science of discourse is another discussion. We would claim that provided a diachronic dimension is admitted, and provided attention to the particular and the unique is not seen as barring access to the universal but rather as giving it, much of the seeming incompatibility between the two pursuits disappears.) With respect to history, the problem is to discover the deeply related historicities of the state of society at any given time, the “real” being the referent, and of discourse, including literary discourse, within and upon it at any given time. The common denominator of historicity should not be used as a pool of pragmatic examples in which either a historical event or situation or a literary phenomenon serves to reduce the identity of one discipline to that of the other. Of course, this is not said for the sake of preserving absolute entities called disciplines; on the contrary: in Renaissance research particularly a plurality of disciplinary approaches should prevail. It is important, however, that homogeneous series be studied within each discipline, so as to build credible systems that can then be examined for interrelations with other systems. In this sense, structuralism held as much risk of reducing literary texts to the status of documents for non-literary fields of knowledge as did earlier, naïvely historicist or evolutionary approaches. Semiotics is helpful in that it encourages concentration upon the literary code itself, its traditions, conventions, communication models, while avoiding the risk that comes with formalisms of divorcing in too absolute a way the words of the poem from the world that generates and receives them. In this respect Paul Zumthor has struck the right chord (for example, in Essais de poétique médiévale, 1972) by treating medieval genres as a matter of poetics, and thus form, while entrusting historical endeavours with elucidating the

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societal structures and the mentalities that called for these forms and gave them meaning. This again constitutes a double reason for literary history to proceed inductively in articulating its frameworks. Rather than being imposed artificially, as a matter of ill-founded opposition to what precedes or what follows, the concept of Renaissance should be reached inductively by testing a “functional” hypothesis according to which a literary Renaissance takes place when a series of functions are simultaneously present, such as rebirth of classical letters and thought, defence and enrichment of the vernacular as a literary language, critical examination of texts, rise of nationalism, development of a bourgeoisie, impetus of scientific inquiry. Rather than criteria of Renaissance literature, these are the conditions under which Renaissance literature will develop its genres, themes, and topoï. These are some of the reflections that underpin the writing of the four Renaissance volumes of the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. The sub-series is entitled L’Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1610), and with this comprehensive concept it hopes to inventory and articulate the literature of the epoch rather than to single out a particular movement. Immediately the question arises of defining “literature,” and this in turn calls forth two sets of factors that must be reconciled: the Renaissance person’s own vision of “poetry” and our twentieth-century vision of literary discourse. During the two centuries under consideration, the fifteenth and sixteenth, the immanent representation of literary creation depends on a state of literary awareness that arises only gradually and differs from country to country. Another variable is linked to the rise, codification, and decline of genres. Grande rhétorique and Meistersang cultivate an increasingly technical art of poetry, and will be reproached by their successors for an overemphasis on verbal devices. The dérimage, or unrhyming of the great epic romances in the fifteenth century, deconstructs their formal architecture to prolong suspense for the benefit of their audiences. Theatre in the fifteenth century is rife with grand religious spectacles, including their comical aspects and counterparts; but one may wonder where, amidst these collective creations, is the end of the feast and the beginning of authorial responsibility usually associated with literariness. If, moreover, reception also constitutes a criterion, as is believed today, then all such formal changes are tantamount to aesthetic choices, corresponding to new horizons of expectation. These still fall short of the exalted sense of personal creation or “invention,” be it heavily dependent upon treasure finds from the classical past, which alone is felt to pave the way for formal beauty as it will gradually be molded, in the

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sixteenth century, by the unique intervention of poets marrying ideas to devices. The sixteenth century will also work at reconciling the pleasant and the useful in vast sectors of discourse that hitherto had been thought to belong to the quest for truth alone: homiletics, history, philosophy, even science. This does not mean that concern with form had been altogether absent previously; the example of medieval homiletics suffices to prove the opposite, but clearly it cultivates form to the exact extent that it wishes to grip its audience and keep it subjugated by its rhetoric. In this respect humanism brings with itself a true differential as it gains ground first in the Italian Quattrocento and gradually in other European countries throughout the sixteenth century, and works in two opposite yet complementary directions: implanting forms and ideas drawn from classical antiquity and thereby renewing – which also means preserving – existing traditions. To the advancement of formal efficacy and skill – all the qualities that are subsumed under the multifaceted label of rhetoric – humanism brings its concern for a responsible and creative use of the word, enriched by cornucopia and mirroring the ideal harmony. Literature absorbs a number of doxographic fields (the letter, the commentary, the dialogue, even the treatise itself) because the humanist aspires to create beauty in all domains of thought and action reunited, whilst beauty also creates him qua man. Thus literature conquers new fields while traditional genres become atrophied, pending their various renascences as they come into contact with models drawn from classical antiquity. Yet this is by no means a uniform movement, and the historian finds in the national literatures strong evidence of indigenous continuities alongside, or despite, the lure of classical models. It has been known for a long time that the poetic explosion known as the Pléiade school of poetry in France was in fact both surrounded and infiltrated by traditional French models rather than being the absolute revival it claimed to be of classical authors by means of imitating them. In the development of satirical writing, traditional forms and themes are far more visible in most European countries, with the exception of Italy, than the formal satire of Latin origin. As we further probe the nature of the literary corpus at hand, popular literature deserves attention. In the fifteenth century especially it would make little sense to exclude bodies of texts that scored the widest circulation for their value as entertainment (heroic legends), religious materials (hagiography, biblical narratives, hymns, songs) or didactic aids (encyclopedias). Rather than to oppose the popular and the learned as a matter of hypothesis, it is necessary to probe their parallel and joint existence and to describe their respective audiences. In

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the fifteenth century it would appear that literature tends to coincide with the social discourse as a whole more than in the sixteenth, when literary awareness is on the rise (as is artistic awareness) both in the creators’ sense of their own vocation and in their concentration upon the signifier. Literary history stands to gain by carefully watching – within the entire field of discourse in these two centuries, as it compiles past knowledge and searches for the new – for signs of a specific literary discourse of the Renaissance, and by acknowledging the constant osmosis between them. Without the intellectual, moral, and social Renaissance there would be no specific literary discourse in the formal sense; for this reason Renaissance literary history must include rather than exclude intellectual history. This means that texts by writers such as Alberti, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, Lefèvre d’Etaples, Calvin, and countless others are objects of formal analysis, ranging among the formal analyses of texts more routinely treated as literary. It also means that relationships of homology must constantly be sought between literary and social structures. An example might well lie in the area of the large, Europe-wide production of Petrarchan canzonieri with their Platonic imagery and their monolithic concentration upon idealized love. Traditional scholarship has concentrated much attention on this area, treating it as a massive phenomenon of imitation rather than probing it as a state of the imagination seemingly divorced from social reality, and even diseased, when the lyrical subject’s melancholy totally surrenders to the dominant power of the lady. Could it be an artfully reversed image of male dominancy? Could it be a formalized image of individual powerlessness and lack of purpose among the clash of collective forces? This limited but representative example shows why it is advisable and fruitful to combine formally literary studies with contextual studies. Naturally, the kind of historiography that results will depend on the balancing of space allotted to the two series respectively, but above all to the treatment of the relationships between them. In L’Avènement des temps nouveaux (1400–80) a centripetal pattern was chosen, proceeding from a co-ordinated variety of historical factors to a co-ordinated variety of literary themes and forms. From a chapter on political change describing the state of Christendom in 1400 and the awakening nationalisms, the inquiry continues towards the “Univers de la nouvelle civilisation,” which links such phenomena as banking and urban renewal with the widened knowledge of the earth and of the entire universe, and towards “Les Supports de la nouvelle culture” such as the impetus of Greek and Latin studies, the libraries, the universities, the printing press; and “Le Nouvel Esprit humaniste,” describing many of the intel-

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lectual conquests of humanism as a new mentality. It then deals under the title of “Le Renouveau spirituel” with all that, in the fifteenth century, foreshadows, prior to the Reformation, the need for a renewal of the Roman Catholic Church and the expressions of that need. “The Artistic Revolution” shows that major innovations, such as the third dimension in painting and urban planning as linked to architecture by humanism, affect the writer’s vision of the world. One of the major issues relating to the concept of literature is activated in “Diffusion et réfraction du savoir,” since much encyclopaedic, didactic, historical, religious, and even satirical material that is examined requires that this concept be extended beyond its traditional limits, and the reader must be given to understand the reasons for this extension through the concrete description of the texts themselves (rather than through theoretical statements about the limits of literature). “L’Évolution des thèmes traditionnels” is envisaged through the courtly tradition, the literature of knighthood (itself augmented by non-narrative writings that perpetuate the knightly vision of society, life, and the world), the lives of heroes and the processes by which they become imagined and described as heroes; the development of the novella; and the fifteenth-century heritage of the three great Italian forerunners, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. This leads to the last major topic: “L’Essor de la littérature savante,” which covers the role of translation from Greek into Latin as well as from the two classical languages into the vernacular; humanist poetry; the earliest humanist drama; the new historiography, and the cult of famous personalities. Volume three of the sub-series, Maturations et mutations (1520–60), is to proceed, by contrast, from intellectual towards social and political phenomena, while the rise of literary and aesthetic awareness occupies the very centre of the book. The opening chapter is a study of the various Reformation movements, as well as the “Catholic Restoration,” in their relationship to literature and therefore also as producers of literature. “La Diffusion de l’évangelisme” studies the impact of evangelical fervour as well as its Catholic response in hymnology and poetry, in the literature of polemic and edification. This is followed by “Défense et illustration des langues nationales”: their grammars, their vernacular translations of the Bible, the rights of vernacular versus Latin poetry, the cult of language itself. Then under the title “Pour l’aristocratie de l’esprit” some of the leading phenomena of the literature of the élite are studied: the romances of chivalry; the rise of the pastoral forms; the “littérature classicisante,” which links the development of vernacular literatures to classical models; Petrarchism and Neo-Platonism as literary phenomena. “Conscience littéraire et artistique” concentrates, first of

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all, on the status of poetry among the arts and that of the poet and artist in society, and then goes on to explore the theoretical thinking of the period as manifest in the rhetorical crisis, in the new popularity of Aristotelian poetics, in genre theory, and in relationships drawn between musical and poetic theory. “Progrès de l’érudition et de la science” inventories the many conquests of critical scholarship and of science; “Mondes nouveaux” not only describes the conquest of new spaces and the development of geographical writing but the image of the new worlds in the literatures of the New World and, obversely, the beginnings of literatures in European languages on distant shores. “La Culture populaire” is a constant presence alongside learned culture; often, their interdiscursive relationships are difficult to bring to light so that literary history is at first tempted to view them separately: tales and fables, mythological legends; the songs of heroes and historical events sung by bards; didactic literature for the common people; popular drama; the madrigal – all these have specific lives and forms and therefore functions of their own in comparison with the learned forms (e.g., popularized history and humanistic historiography). The final chapter, “Des Crises matérielles à une crise des mentalités,” studies a range of historical events, phenomena, and situations (such as the expansion of the Turkish empire or the sack of Rome, not in themselves but for their role as symbols in literature) and culminates in an analysis of moral conflict and philosophical destabilization – signs of the Renaissance crisis to be expressed in Mannerism. Two of the four volumes of the sub-series were taken as examples in order to illustrate the difficulty of dealing with the dialectical relation between the “textual” and “contextual” moments, and, more specifically, the fact that the inner order of priorities, which is the same in the case of the two volumes, can be projected into completely different sequences in the ordering of subject-matter. It is hoped that in this way the purpose of the project can best be fulfilled: rather than to presuppose a pan-European literary system, to bring to light and articulate its components. The broadly cultural and historical outline thus allows the literary system to become manifest within it as an integral part of the social discourse. The inductive approach is also helpful in obviating preconceived patterns of periodization, at least within each of the four chronological sections chosen for the four volumes, as follows: 1400–80: L’Avènement de l’esprit nouveau 1480–1520: La Nouvelle Culture 1520–60: Maturations et mutations 1560–1610: Crise et essors nouveaux

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For such broad divisions as these historians must take responsibility; they were set with a view to widely accepted articulations, which nevertheless cannot accommodate all national phenomena; their pragmatic nature must therefore be acknowledged. Within chronological sections it is important that no uniform mould be imposed on any series of phenomena, so that chronological and geographical divergences can be made explicit. A naïvely developmental approach can thus be avoided; national specificities can be observed; also, each series of literary phenomena can appear in its own right, without fear of acknowledging continuity and tradition in one field (e.g., the popular praise of heroes in the fifteenth century) when a neighbouring field is in process of renewal (humanistic treatment of great men). Dominants are derived inductively and so is the final articulation and coherence. In this way the working hypotheses expressed in the four major chronological divisions and in the volume outlines have been constantly corrected. And the comparative aspect of the whole has, hopefully, been preserved, in that “divergent” data – often those linked to texts in less well-known languages in comparison with those in majority languages – are represented on an equitable basis. These thoughts are based on an experiment partly still in the making; if my thoughts on historiography in process have been understood, it can also be admitted that malleability is not a fault but an advantage; theory and practice are seen to interact, correct, and challenge one another.

works cited Klaniczay, Tibor, Eva Kushner, and André Stegmann, éds. L’Avènement de l’esprit nouveau (1400–80). Renaissance vol. 1 of Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó 1988. Klaniczay, Tibor, Eva Kushner, and Paul Chavy. éds. Crises et essors nouveaux (1560–1610). Renaissance vol. 4 of Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes. Amsterdam: Benjamins 2000.

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10 Comparative Literary History among the Human Sciences

As is well known, in recent decades literary studies, and more particularly comparative literary studies, have undergone a process of reexamination, for reasons of their own as well as for reasons linked to the challenge of other disciplines, those designated today “the human sciences.” My title implies, in hope at least, a change of emphasis: the impact of such disciplines as linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociology, and cultural anthropology has often been perceived as potentially aggressive, and harmful, with respect to the specificity of literary studies. But literary studies have emerged from this test not only without loss of specificity but having gained in self-awareness. To discuss their place among the human sciences is to consider them, and their interrelationships, within the entire spectrum of the human sciences, as one “human science” among the others. The expression “human sciences” itself may require some explanation. In Canada at least it has been used in the past decade, institutionally, as an aggregate expression to designate the humanities and social sciences grouping, known in France as “lettres et sciences humaines” (although “sciences de l’homme” has more particularly served as the

Given as part of the Distinguished Lectures series, Faculty of Arts, McGill University, Feb. 1986; inaugural lecture, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Aug. 1990. Published in Comparative Literary History as Discourse, Essays in Honour of Anna Balakian, ed. M.J. Valdés, D. Javitch, A.O. Aldridge (Bern: Peter Lang 1982), 69–80.

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equivalent of the social sciences grouping, separate from more literary and humanistic fields). The Canadian case is significant because it was a legislative decision, embodied in the creation of a granting agency in 1978, that officially united the humanities and social sciences disciplines under a common title, and gave them a status comparable to that of the natural sciences and engineering grouping on the one hand and the medical sciences grouping on the other. While this institutional labelling has little to do with the epistemological, methodological, and theoretical linkages among the disciplines, it is nevertheless indicative of an attitude that literary scholars are free to reject or adopt and that emphasizes the interrelatedness of these disciplines, their potential usefulness to one another, as well as the fact (underscored by the plural of “human sciences”) that they are clearly differentiated from one another. In other words, it is up to literary studies to preserve, within this spectrum, their own specificity. Whether this is theoretically possible and whether it has been carried out in practice depends on the definition given to the word “science.” Some definitions could be alienating, in that “scientificity” leads to such expectations as verifiability by testing and stable validity of laws within a given universe. What is important here is not whether literary knowledge meets or does not meet norms of validity established in respect of the exact sciences, but that norms of validity be found for literary studies that will give them an equivalent validity. These considerations in turn modulate the meaning of the term “sciences,” which can apply to literary knowledge, as do, for example, its French and German equivalents, as long as it is well understood that scientific validity is established in ways that vary to a significant extent according to the body of knowledge considered. Within the field of literary studies the specific place of comparative literature also requires renewed attention. In the wake of nationalisms that have variously arisen, died down, and sometimes flared up again between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, literatures arose as symbolic possessions of nations; this resulted in the fact that “national” literatures appeared to be more natural, evident, fundamental phenomena than international groupings of texts, forms, or themes, with the consequence that the study of national literatures became the foundation of literary studies. Furthermore, there often exists a fundamental link between a national literature and a language. When this situation is taken as a basic model, which it very often is, the study of literature is institutionalized as a “discipline” in the schools and universities of the corresponding area(s) of the world, and departments and chairs take charge of teaching and research in it.

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There are concrete situations that challenge this simple model: for example, countries such as Belgium or Canada, where two major cultures and languages coexist, not to mention minority cultures and languages. The point here is not to hail comparative literature as a quick remedy wherever such a situation arises but to draw attention to the relativeness of the concept of national literature. The example of the United States is most relevant here: English and American literature embody, as a continuum, the literary establishment. Today that establishment is being modified from inside by Black and Chicano literature, not to mention the case of the various literatures in exile that have found a home in the us American literature written in English has not become less relevant, and English departments have not lost their institutional primacy, but the object of study they serve is changing, and lines of division have become fluid and have often merged to reflect problems common to a variety of literatures. Does this lead us directly to enshrining comparative literature as a field of scholarly endeavour free of all political and institutional encumbrances and open to all languages and cultures? To think so would imply that comparative literature is devoid of ideology and presuppositions, which cannot be true. Nor do comparative literary studies thrive on underestimating the fundamental nature of national literatures and their multiple histories, or on the hope of replacing cultural nationalisms by a vague, elitist internationalism. They are at their best when they function as a dynamic complement of the study of national literatures. Literature cannot be divorced from its linguistic roots, from the substance of words, any more than signs and meanings can be separated from their cultural context. That is why comparative literature deals, to all possible extents, with texts in their languages of origin, and why no one is encouraged to study it without a previous grounding in two or three languages and literatures at least. But what is the purpose of the parallel or relational study of literary phenomena, beyond the satisfaction of discovering parallels? Until recently, in comparative literature the study of such parallels and divergences, resemblances and differences seemed to constitute an end in itself, so that internationality of subject-matter was also treated as an end in itself. Though it is still an important dimension of comparative literary studies, one that is valuable for its own sake, it can no longer be regarded as the most basic dimension. To discover the common traits as well as the divergences of Romantic or Symbolist poems in several European languages, or to watch the transformations of themes, myths, legendary figures as they cross and span linguistic barriers, are activities that help us to discern and underscore invariants and variables, and thus to bring into relief aspects of the literary sys-

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tem. In less technical terms, it could also be said that signs of unity among works of art of different nations bear witness to the unity of the human phenomenon itself. Thus comparative literature takes part in regenerating the humanities and in at least problematizing a humanistic vision. In this sense it fulfils a function similar to that which used to belong to classical studies when they were a compulsory part of a university education: to provide a corpus of texts symbolically representative of the “human condition” in a universally understandable form, a set of methods of analysis to make them accessible, and a set of concepts enabling the student to grasp the transcoding of messages from one state of civilization to another, and indeed from one civilization to another. Because of this corpus and the set of tools that went with it and still does, classical studies were the focus of the humanities. In the abstract it might be said that Classics departments retain that status today insofar as they provide the original model for aesthetic, moral, and philosophical concepts from which many modern Western concepts have evolved (for example, the basic concepts of Aristotle’s Poetics). What prevents them from retaining that status exclusively in practice is first of all the sharply decreasing number of students who know Latin and Greek. It is also the fact that, in the humanities and social sciences, genesis and historical precedent have lost their exclusive priority as explanations of phenomena. The prestige of antiquity and historicity is far from lost, but it is at least equalled by the heuristic appeal of themes and patterns of our time. Thus the search for universals in literature can just as well take the form of East-West and North-South comparisons as of tracing continuities and transformations from classical antiquity onward. For that reason, comparative literary studies have the potential to become the new focus of a modern humanities curriculum. But internationality of outlook no longer suffices to qualify comparative literature for this function. Courses, articles, books, and research projects cannot consider themselves “comparative” just because they study the relations of two texts or phenomena in two different languages. Theoretically and methodologically speaking, the interlinguistic factor is not per se a guarantee of innovative results; its presence is necessary but not sufficient. A study of modernity in twentieth-century poetry, for instance, would yield excellent results with respect to an inventory of dominant themes or devices, or with respect to a general concept of poetry as a revolutionary voice in society, whether the group of texts studied was in one language or two or more. What matters is the completeness and coherence of criteria enabling us to characterize a group of texts synchronically, or to study the rise of

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modernity diachronically. The way this occurs in a given literature is closely related to the evolution of its literary system and, within it, to its prosody, which in turn has intimate links with its language. Thus it is not enough to be able to point to interlinguistic and interliterary resemblances; these form only the beginning of such a study. In fact, given certain aspects of Western mentality between the two world wars, one would expect thematic resemblances to occur regardless of “influences.” Fragmentation, non-closure, irony, self-referentiality are quasiuniversal characteristics; the demonstration of their presence is the beginning, not the end, of the inquiry, whose task is to show their variations according to language, poet, text. In fact, the specific attack upon tradition in each case provides the material from which gradually, by confrontation of cases, a theory can be drawn from a comparison of relations: the manner in which a poem relates to its own language and the prosody, conventions, and tradition linked to that language illustrate the particular working of the literary system at a given time, in a given place. Correlated data can be derived from examples in other languages, with the consequence that we are verifying, with homogeneous examples, the working of the literary system with respect to modern poetry, including time-lags or the absence of given phenomena in certain literatures. Thus the understatement typical of modernity works quite differently in different languages; so does the attack on parallelism. Whether the inquiry is about two languages or a variety of languages, or limits itself to one language we are learning more about the nature of poetry and the organization of poetic discourse. In this perspective, the internationality of comparative literature is in no way lost from sight, as the weight of the critical inquiry shifts to the workings of the literary system. It is in fact simply taken for granted, with the result that the discipline cannot be content with surface internationalism as its best asset. There is another, concrete reason for this. As a large number of young or renewed literatures emerge on to the international scene, we are learning that categories and concepts cannot automatically be drawn from one literature to describe the history and articulation of another. Ignoring developmental specificities leads to false generalization. In studying African literatures written in European languages it is all too easy, but also misleading, to stress what an African work has in common with seminal European works and to ignore the African intertext within and across nations, including the all-pervasive presence of oral tradition. For example, Mongo Beti, the Cameroonian novelist, has at times been compared to Voltaire: he uses, in Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba, the device of the naïve observer in the guise of the young native man who accompanies the

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priest in his travels and who seems as innocent as Candide. The parallel is not totally devoid of value, since in both states of civilization at the time of writing the Church had to be denounced indirectly; but it makes light of the scandalous effect on the young African man of the very religion that was to replace his native pagan religion. This error might be regarded as a detail, but it is representative of a more fundamental error: the failure to detect and bring to light the specificity of African aesthetics and its ethical basis; and this in turn calls attention to an even more fundamental risk of error, which is the failure to recognize the phenomenon of emergence of new literatures and to make adequate allowances for them in history, criticism, and theory. This is what happens when European concepts and categories are applied by extrapolation to non-European phenomena linked to an unrelated state of civilization. Generally speaking, comparative literature has become far more attentive to the examination of literary discourse, that is, to literary theory. Undoubtedly, this attention is shared by those who study single national literatures. Much innovative research and writing relevant to comparative literature has come, in recent years, from departments of various national literatures and, for that matter, of linguistics, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, semiotics, or, as in the case of several French theoreticians of note, from outside the universities, and much interdisciplinary reflection has occurred. As part of this process, comparative literature has taken a leading part in the epistemological re-examination of literary studies. One reason for this is that it is a younger discipline than studies in many of the national literatures, which are more firmly institutionalized in their geographic and political areas. Curiosity about “the Other” is sporadic and selective. The kind of broad cultural sweep that seemed normal to Renaissance humanists, or to the ever so cosmopolitan philosophers of the eighteenth century, or to Goethe, who coined the concept of Weltliteratur, has by no means been the standard throughout the world or even in Europe, so that when comparative literature began to develop, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it had to win its place in the disciplinary spectrum. This has forced upon it a constant process of self-definition, which, although cumbersome, has served it well: with institutionalization comes hardening of the arteries. When there came a crisis in literary studies, it consequently caught comparative literature less unaware than most national literary studies fields. As traditional literary history came under fire, the quest for a renewed literary history, or for a new paradigm altogether, often occurred in comparative literature departments, programs, congresses, journals. The proceedings of the successive triennial congresses of the International

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Comparative Literature Association record these deliberations and keep alive an attitude of healthy self-criticism, forcing teachers and researchers to remain attentive to the conceptual framework of their subject-matter; the nature of the discipline is forever under discussion. Until the Second World War, in most European universities comparative literature was tantamount to the study of historically ascertainable interliterary relations among authors, works, aspects of works. The challenge that came from the Prague linguistic circle and from Russian formalism forced concentration upon the text itself, in many cases the poem, and its internal relations. Jakobson’s definition of literary communication, based on that of all linguistic communication with its set of six functions, graphically embodies this change in that it invites analysis of the literary text as a set of communicative strategies (including the crucial distinctiveness of the poetic function). Although this challenge did not arise within comparative literature nominally, it profoundly affected the discipline by sharply drawing attention to intratextual factors, and this paved the way for the impact of New Criticism and Nouvelle critique, which in turn came under fire for severing the literary work of art from its social origins, meanings, and destinations; consequently, greater emphasis began to be placed, within the circuit of literary communication, upon the reception, the public, the reader of the literary work. Thus literary studies evolve by responding to challenges from both inside and outside their field. In these discussions, comparative literature often serves as a sounding-board and meeting-ground, and where it does not, it has at least the potential to do so. In the matter of applying theories to problems of general literature it has at its disposal the entire field of world literature – that is, ideally, the corpus of all texts in all languages. This it is far from possessing in practice, but it stands ready to compare co-ordinated examples from a variety of literatures in order to test a theoretical stance. One of the most important questions literary studies have always faced, but seldom as consciously as today, is the matter of sorting out the “literary” from the “non-literary.” Classical doctrines self-assuredly define “poetry”; formalisms, and their various sequels, show no doubt of what is specifically literary, and provide structural grounds for their assertions; they do not see the ideological conditioning of these assertions. One of the attitudes literary studies have gradually acquired in their contacts with the social sciences is a readiness to understand and situate one’s own bias. While it is possible to view the development of literary systems as they define themselves – that is, with their own local and time-bound perception of what belongs and does not belong to literature – the need has arisen for understanding how the selection op-

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erates: how a canon arises and what decides the revisions of that canon. Again, comparative literature is an appropriate ground for such discussion because it is able to survey, regardless of linguistic barriers, the migration of texts from place to place and epoch to epoch, and the modes of transformation that accompany the migration. Gradually it has been realized that social discourse as a whole is the ground where, at a given time and place, texts enter the canon or become excluded. Thus, comparative literature has gradually expanded into the comparative study of critical theory as well as of literary texts themselves, and this is what makes possible an osmotic relationship of comparative literature with the study of national literatures: all national literatures today share general problematics and theoretical concerns for the discussion of which comparative literature may be a meeting-ground, in theory as well as in practice. To say this is in no way to attribute any sort of epistemological or logical priority to comparative literature within literary studies, but to underscore its potential for the enrichment of human sciences. In the past few decades all disciplines within the humanities and social sciences have undergone theoretical and methodological selfquestioning; let us think, for example, of history, with its division into quantitative and non-quantitative studies, the recognition of the historian’s intervention in the reconstruction of past events, the Ecole des Annales, psychohistory, and so on. Literary studies were, however, the last field to undergo this process of self-examination. One of the facts revealed in the process was that certain fundamental concepts articulating literary history were taken over uncritically from the kind of deterministic thinking that used to be associated with the natural sciences. Take, for example, the concept of causation that underlies that of influence: literary works were thought to be “caused” by prior surrounding circumstances. Literary historians attempted to equate the objectivity and rigour of the physicist; they would do so by gathering “facts,” especially biographical ones, thus practising a type of positivism. A variation of this was a certain type of geneticism (e.g., that of Brunetière), which would treat literary genres as biological phenomena destined to life and survival or to decline and extinction. History thus conceived encompassed the rest of the literary field (including criticism, which was by and large concrete, and theory, which was by and large normative), since the process of explication was heavily slanted towards discovery of antecedents and geneses. It was the extrapolation of superficially scientific concepts that alienated literary studies from their own purpose and nature. As I stated earlier, from linguistics came the impetus towards the use of intrinsic

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methods of analysis and interpretation, and the moment of New Criticism, and the Nouvelle critique with its thematic approaches, was a search for the truth of the text in the text; it was embedded there by the author’s organizing skill, and objectively manifest in the structural fabric. Intrinsic methods (one might think of Werkimmanente Interpretation) easily led to utter isolation and even solipsism: the relationship of critic and author by means of the text was a one-to-one relationship. The quantum leap between this kind of criticism and structuralism consisted in the abandonment of the search for the personality of the author in the text and that of his/her intentionality in its meaning: the text, in the structuralist perspective, carried networks of signs that also made it an object of analysis for a neighbouring social science, say anthropology. Structures are universal as research concepts, not only in the social but in the “hard” sciences; literary studies gained in systematicity as literary critics pored over linguistic, psychoanalytical, anthropological models; but once again a danger came in the wake of extrapolating on the basis of concepts and methods drawn from other disciplines, especially when too literal an application was sought, as was all too often the case with Propp’s situations, or Lévi-Strauss’s mythical sequences. A model is, by definition, reductive. Literary scholars faced the challenge of seeking the applicability and heuristic value of models drawn from the social sciences without sacrificing the uniqueness of literary texts. Narratology has been one of the major achievements that resulted from these confrontations, since it provides fictional models for all aspects of narrative texts yet does not claim exhaustive explication and interpretation can thus be achieved. Narratological approaches are eminently compatible with sociocritical considerations: textual structures are rich in indications about social structures, whether or not one adopts Goldmann’s homologies. Again, thematic literary approaches pave the way for psychoanalytic interpretations that will not reduce the text to the status of a clinical document – Freud himself was aware of this problem – but will treat each word, each letter, with Lacanian seriousness. Thus, since the fifties, literary studies have opened themselves to the impact of several fields of inquiry that held out the promise of improved scientificity; and once again, loss of the rigour that was sought was often the price of misguided extrapolation of methods and concepts. One aspect of the interface between literary studies and the social science disciplines that could be more helpful were it better understood is their use of terminology. This is an area where attitudes have tended towards extremes. Certain humanists seem offended at the thought of using, in their disciplines, the specialized lexicons of

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linguistics, semiotics, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, computer science, which to them seem unhumanistic. There are, at the same time, uncompromising theoreticians who feel that their work would be less scholarly and valuable were it not sustained by such technical terms. Gradually, however, the gap has narrowed, as humanists realize that these terminologies can actually provide conceptual advances and shortcuts to successful interpretation. Humanists have become more receptive, and the fear that they would somehow attack the core of the humanistic enterprise has lessened. The computer has also become a tool of the humanities, not only of the social sciences. It is by no means the case that all humanists use computer techniques, or a semiotically based terminology, but it is now understood that these are irreversibly harnessed in the service of humanistic research. The humanist’s fear of these tools seems superfluous. What is at stake is not the survival of the literary texts themselves; the least that can be said about them, without implying any sort of fetishism with respect to their special qualities, is that they are time-resistant and resilient. It is, rather, the possible disappearance of a certain type of humanistic discourse that really worries some humanists, and this may signal fear of the unknown rather than an automatic loss of value. Let us take as an example semiotic approaches and their broad concept of combining all systems of signs. In what way can this challenge the humanities? Certainly, the emphasis on non-verbal systems of communication implies frontiers for the written word. Yet to broaden our understanding of communication and, for that purpose, to compare among themselves and systematize codes that had not hitherto been brought into contact challenges our understanding of man. We are disturbed by its neutrality and thereby forced into a more relative view of the written word itself, but is it really faithful to the permanent vocation of the humanities to link the Word to a certain medium permanentlty? Whoever said that the Gutenberg era would last forever? An additional claim semiotics has made is that it has the potential to provide a new epistemological basis for the human sciences. Because meaning is elusive and the reality of things unknowable, let us concentrate on signs and on articulating and correlating systems of signs. Semiotics is, by definition, an interdisciplinary pursuit in that it deals with notation translatable across disciplinary boundaries. In the literary field this makes manifest patterns of literary communication within culture as a whole. Again, this openness to non-literary modes of understanding does not cancel the possibility of an aesthetic treatment of literary problems within the literary field; it does destabilize the aesthetic basis to the extent of challenging the scholar to be conscious of its relativeness and of its linkages with non-literary systems.

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This in turn makes the specificity of the literary into a question of viewpoint rather than forcing an either/or answer about its very existence. It confirms the continued validity of the attitude that was Doubrovsky’s (Qu’est-ce que la nouvelle critique? 33) when he called for interdisciplinary studies and at the same time warned against the extrapolation of methodologies from sociology, psychology, and linguistics lest literary scholarship destroy its own basis. Starobinski’s “trajet critique” sketched out, for a long time to come, every conceivable aspect of the study of literary texts, from that of their genesis through that of their structure and form and meaning to that of their reception and societal future. At every step a non-literary discipline, such as sociology, can be brought into the process. Far from threatening “literature,” it bears witness to its polysemy – that is, to its ability, among other things, to represent through its forms a state of society at a given time. In short, interdisciplinary dialogue is not obtained by the reduction of one field of study to another but by the creation and use of an appropriate metalanguage describing it to itself and, consequently, to others.

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11 Comparative Literary History as Dialogue among Nations

Along with other human sciences, literary studies have been undergoing a phase of intense self-legitimation and self-justification. According to Linda Hutcheon this is part of a postmodern situation in which no values are embodied a priori in any set of texts or in the study of any set of texts, and literary studies are, therefore, in a situation resembling exactly those of all other methodological and theoretical forms of discourse, trying to find their legitimacy in themselves. If that is so, literary scholars have reason to rejoice in the self-examination and autocriticism that is required of them, the need for which had of course always existed, without being so insistently acknowledged. In this autoreflexive movement among the disciplines there has been a historical sequence in which literary studies came last with an aggiornamento now a few decades old; the number of decades depends on when you situate its beginning, and what country is being considered. We know how much has happened in linguistics since Saussure’s first lectures, how transformed anthropology was in moving from a historical and longitudinal to a structural and latitudinal basis, how history has become diversified by divisions between quantitative and non-quantitative methods as well as by methods such as those of the Ecole des Annales and of psychohistory.

Keynote address (originally in French) at the Eighteenth Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures, Novi Sad, Aug. 1990. Published in Neo-Helicon 30, no. 2 (1993): 37–50.

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What, then, happened in literary studies? A long upheaval that we can now better see in perspective, not as a catastrophic event but as a process of consolidation, diversification, and enrichment. But it has been a long road that, rightly or wrongly, for better or worse, led through a thorough questioning of literary history. Here I must open a parenthesis in order to recognize the distinction, in French, between “histoire littéraire,” which includes the entire field of literary production within its whole cultural context, and “histoire des littératures,” which builds upon aesthetic criteria the history of those works chosen as more valuably expressive of humankind. That distinction itself disappears once we begin to view more critically the process of canonization and institutionalization of literary works. What is mere “histoire littéraire” for one historian – let us take the example of surrealist manifestos – may well enter “histoire des littératures” in the eyes of a historian who attributes literariness to doxographic writings. Historians of Renaissance literature are very sensitive to the literary dimension of treatises, letters, dialogues, commentaries, proverbs, even encyclopaedias. We might observe a similar breakdown of distinctions between what used to be considered Geistesgeschichte, or intellectual history, and the study of forms. Furthermore, these changing perspectives on the study of literature have helped to detach it from an exclusive relationship to a national past and present: the ongoing reflection builds upon the experience of scholars in a number of countries, and literary theorizing has become quite international, while at the same time it has helped us to understand better the rootedness of literary texts in their own “polysystems” and the dynamics between these two sets of relationships. The authors of Poetics no. 14, a special issue devoted to literary historiography, draw attention once again to the fact that the reconstruction of history wie es eigentlich gewesen is a mirage. They propose a “constructivist” view, which is a healthy admission of the fact that all history is a new construct and therefore the product of a here and a now. In the history of literary history this has, by and large, not been sufficiently recognized. Once it is recognized, the uncritical reconstructions that have been under fire as “traditional literary history” are much less disturbing; we learn to see them and to present them not as monuments but as documents dictated by certain conditions of production. It is much clearer now that even such reference works as the Dictionnaire de biographie universelle or the Cambridge histories harbour recognizable ideological presuppositions. Such observations have two functions: 1. they explain how it was not the works of literary history themselves but the naïve acceptance of them as objectively reliable documents, as well as insufficient attention to the fact that it is not only

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historical but all other dogmatic constructs that have epistemological weaknesses, that hampered the credibility of literary history; 2. by supplying these perspectives, they restore the use of national literary histories as discourse of their people and their time, at the disposal of others who wish to understand those peoples and those periods. Let us briefly survey the epistemological weaknesses that were (or are) the Achilles’ heel of unanalysed literary history. The first of these is dependence on the concept of causation, imported from a superficial observance of scientific determinism. The exact sciences work with concomitant and recurrent phenomena, building upon them hypotheses concerning the reasons for recurrences. Determinism worked these into an absolute philosophical expectation of recurrence under given conditions. The worst of so-called positivism applied this sort of fallacious reasoning – or absence of reasoning – to literary phenomena. Given A, which could be a set of social and/or economic factors, B would be its literary consequence. For example, students of French literature would be told that sons of aristocrats and rich merchants who had believed in the Napoleonic dream were driven to melancholy by the defeat of Napoleon, and therefore became Romantics. This kind of false determinism makes contextual factors into “causes” of textual factors, bypassing, in this particular case, the fact that these young men also had to choose poetry, acquire skills in it, and take positions vis-à-vis existing textual traditions in order that their link with Romanticism could be asserted. But A could also be a cultural factor, and even a text, such as a manifesto, which would be described as having an unfailing, direct, “causal” effect on poetry, novels, or plays rather than as a compatible discursive accompaniment of these. Another philosophically unstable concept was that of time; literary history was represented as occurring in neat containers called “periods” into which works, movements, styles had to fit. When it comes to the international study of literary phenomena, this approach is particularly harmful, since it tends to demand that literary phenomena unfold at the same rhythm and in the same time-span in countries that may be at very different stages of their cultural history (even assuming – which we cannot assume – that literary development will go through comparable stages in every civilization). The Renaissance, for example, did not unfold in the same chronological span from country to country, from south to north, from west to east; all we can say is that a set of phenomena such as the advent of philological humanism, the rediscovery of classical antiquity, an impressive flowering of the arts and letters, the defence and development of vernacular languages and literatures, the unprecedented expansion of geographical and scientific horizons – all this within the framework of the rise of the bourgeoisie –

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signals that a Renaissance indeed took place; in many countries of Europe, and especially outside Europe, this set of phenomena simply did not happen within the limits of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (see N.I. Balachov et al., 1978). Nevertheless, there exists a comparatist compulsion to fit these phenomena into parallel time-spans and describe them in parallel ways; the temptation to account for developments in younger, emerging literatures in terms of the progression of older, major literatures in their mother languages similarly presupposes a uniform development in time, without attention to the relationship between the younger literature and the culture and state of civilization to which it relates. Thus, Quebec literature of the nineteenth century was described in some of the earlier compendia on French Canadian literature as a rapid succession of Romanticism, Parnassus, Symbolism, and Realism, though neither the appropriateness of these categories nor the necessity of their appearing in a chronological order was questioned. Another concept dear to the kind of literary history we are attempting to leave behind is that of “fact.” Whether we look at the history of works or of authors, few utterances apart from those concerning dates, sequences of dates, publication data, or circumstances of publication are factual, as are basic textological data in a critical edition, and perhaps the most basic statements concerning genre; but as soon as aesthetic criteria are invoked, the historian enters upon axiological grounds. The point is not whether he should or should not do so, but that in the name of a certain expected objectivity he was ascribed a factual realm, while the concept of fact itself, from a philosophical standpoint, has gradually come under closer epistemological scrutiny, with the result that factualness itself, let alone literary factualness, cannot be considered a stable element automatically conducive to validity. Lastly, the question of the subject-object relationship in historical inquiry has also undergone considerable revision, to the point where no one thinks any longer that the historian as cognizing subject can wholly grasp and restore a past that would then live on as a stable and available object of study to be known, in turn, by the reader. This means that history has lost an easier path to scientificity and has to seek a more difficult one. In the philosophy of history proper the subject has been increasingly recognized as less solipsistic, less limited, more in touch with the collective unconscious, and, for sociological reasons, more collective; while the object of history is also in question. Distinctions are made between a past (res gestae) that in itself cannot resurrect without the mental intervention of a subject, and a historia rerum gestarum, which Collingwood calls re-enactment because of the cognizing subject’s intervention in it. Thus subject and object interact

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in the construction of history and, even more specifically, of literary history. Furthermore, this interaction takes place within the social discourse of a hic et nunc which it expresses. Though well known, these perspectives needed to be systematized in order to show that the wave of literary theory that struck so many of our faculties, academies, publications, and congresses was not merely a fashion but a deeply needed corrective to make literary studies aware of the problems of validity of knowledge, so that they can be counted among those human sciences that are capable of self-criticism and therefore of renewal. The specific relevance of literary theory to our subject is the role of critic that it has played with respect to literary history. Historically – since we must admit that this critical process itself is part of our intellectual history – the diffidence it has provoked towards literary history resulted in a massive shift towards “immanent,” structural and semiotic studies. The Prague structuralists, the Russian formalists, the New Critics were steeped in historical knowledge, but they turned the attention of literary studies towards the text itself; even the diachronic concept of evolution expounded by Tynianov is textcentred. The theoretical basis of formalism itself would evolve, with Jakobson, in such a way that while the text itself was the centre of attention, it was so as the ground of communication between writer and reader – that is, not as an ahistorical entity but as a relational process. Concentration upon the text itself had been necessary and useful as a reaction against the dominance of contextual “causes” but also as a source of formal schemes and criteria. However, it was realized that something would soon be missing again if, for fear of unreliable history, the analyses were potentially severed from what had given the text its original meaning, in terms both of auctorial impact and of social relatedness. (Even those who do not accept with Goldmann that it is the collectivity that writes the novel with the author’s pen must recognize that the collectivity expresses itself through the author.) It should also be remembered that the dividing line between, on the one hand, Nouvelle critique and New Criticism and, on the other, structuralism passed through the concept of the intentionality of the author. Thematic criticism still sought the secret of the author’s self in the structures of the work; structuralism concentrated more and more on the structures themselves, to elicit their linguistic or social patterns of relationships. It worked in synchrony, though even there, early voices such as that of Lévi-Strauss reminded us that no study can be purely synchronic. The subsequent reaction, still felt in many of our institutions and media of publication, turned the attention of literary studies from too exclusive a concentration on the text towards another, hitherto

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neglected aspect of the critical circuit – communication with the reader, with audiences, and to “aesthetic reception.” Through this emphasis we clearly re-enter the realm of history, since the reception process is both situational and sequential. Here it is essential to remember that both the emphasis on the text and the emphasis on reception occurred, in many ways, in the form of impacts from other human sciences upon literary studies, as linguistics, psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, and Marxist philosophy of history were variously used as sources of methodological help for literary studies, which had been bereft, or so the innovators thought, of their own tools. At that point dutiful students sought to retrieve, exactly, Propp’s thirty-nine situations in anything from the Bible to African folk-tales! All this can be recounted in the past tense because, in reacting to these external impacts, literary studies have emerged on to a betterdefined terrain of their own. Across our divisions, the self-questioning I have been describing has established guiding threads, thus becoming a factor of reunification. In this perspective, the practice of literary historiography, having been profoundly destabilized, has certainly been shaken out of any complacency that may have burdened it in the past and has been challenged by literary theory to revise its epistemological bases. In the process its vitality has been confirmed and restored. At least two of the more recent trends in literary theory quite explicitly recuperate history. One is the social-discourse concept, according to which all forms of expression in a culture are different and complementary aspects of that culture; literary discourse steps out of its isolation among other forms of discourse and abandons its fixation upon literariness. Socialdiscourse theoreticians decidedly work within history. One of their methods lies in selecting chronological sections consisting of one epoch-making year, say the year 1889 (see Angenot, 1989); detailed analysis of texts and iconography constituting the sum of “tout ce qui se dit et s’écrit dans un état de société” reveals an immense amount of knowledge about the prevailing episteme and also about the apparatus regulating its means of expression and communication. One may question the particular procedure, but the value of closely examining the convergences within a year is unquestionable, as is the focus on historicity. The other trend that resituates literary studies within history is the polysystem theory, identified with the name of Itamar Even-Zohar. It is, implicitly at least, correlated with the social-discourse theory in that it views social discourse from the point of view of its own internal dynamic, particularly as regards the entry of extraneous elements, which

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are then transformed into parts of the system. This is typically what occurs in the translation and adaptation process. Plato’s dialogues in the Italian, French, or English Renaissance undergo Christianization. Shakespeare’s style in eighteenth-century French translation abounds in euphemisms to fit in with Neoclassical decorum. In many countries Gulliver’s Travels becomes a children’s book in which the harshness of Swift’s vision is softened. The concept of polysystem also accounts for the canonization of texts that have become institutionally acceptable and for the renewal of literatures by reaction against the canons thus generated; the two movements are shown to be part of the same process. Such a theory is particularly helpful in studying emerging, new, or renewed literatures as they break away from parent European literatures or from their own traditional pasts. Much has been said in this respect about the process of individuation of, say, Brazilian literature vis-à-vis that of Portugal, and we have gained some understanding of the North or South “Americanity” of these literatures written in European languages, yet overwhelmingly different from their systems of origin. What is also coming to the fore is that literary systems do not respect politically imposed borders. In Belgium, former Yugoslavia, Canada, and a host of other countries ethnic realities are not only asserting themselves but claiming a historicity of their own, overriding those of the political federations that encircle them and demanding for themselves a direct entry upon the scene and into the history of world literature. With deconstructive thought as well as postmodernism the focus is upon the historical, in the guise of the uniqueness of each self and each moment, living values to be analysed and explicated in themselves and also as exempla towards the histories of others: this I believe is at least part of what Guillén calls interhistoricity – a knowledgeable exchange of concrete experiences the value of which, from person to person, lies in their concreteness. This may well be, for comparative literary history, the next step in choosing its future tasks and justifications: to acknowledge the relativity of all systems within the perpetual motion of the world system, but also to highlight creatively particular past and/or present commonalities that at a given moment, within the present discourse of one or several cultures, light up and make sense together. Another reason for continuing to activate literary history, already noted by Escarpit, is a pedagogical one. By and large our introductory courses in the various literatures no longer survey vast periods systematically; it is now more common for a series of significant texts to be analysed as the most representative of their time, of which they are

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what Paul Zumthor calls “chronographs.” Rabelais’s Gargantua and Kafka’s The Trial are among the favourites in this respect, but different teachers will have different personal preferences. The challenge lies not in immediately imposing upon students vast constructs in terms of periods, genres, or movements, without denying the need for frames of reference, but, on the contrary, in encouraging the search for these. Am I contradicting myself here? I do not believe so: the point is precisely that frames of reference have to be inductively derived and ever critically revised, rather than imposed from the standpoint of any dominancy whatsoever. Such a praxis will remove, or at least show as being quite relative, the dividing line between studies that address “large” and “minor” problems. In a brilliant schematic representation Dioný3 *urisin showed how all literary studies problems can be plotted upon a series of concentric circles, the outermost circle being the entire field of world literature in time and space, followed by regional and national circles that in turn encompass more and more restricted series of texts and aspects of texts. As long as a problem is correctly set within this complex, it is a valid problem no matter how restricted, since it can always be shown to have wider implications and relationships. It is important that any project, article, book, thesis, or paper state these wider relationships so that the specific concerns it addresses are shown to be relevant to other fields of specialization than its own, and thus enrich the dialogue within literary studies. But how do we assess the larger compendia encapsulating histories of national literatures, as well as attempted international histories? It is not enough to say that national literary histories fill a pedagogical need within their own culture, since to say so begs the question of their validity. What determines the enshrining of works in a national literary history, to the exclusion of others? What defines a national literary history and validates that definition? In what way can the reader be made aware of the nature of dominancy itself? Discourse-analysis methods and the impact of literary theory have combined to dislodge hegemonies and created the need for rewriting histories. For example, many countries including the former ussr and former Czechoslovakia had literary histories that excluded works written in exile. Now new histories are being written in terms of a new inclusiveness. In Renaissance studies there is a movement afoot to “rewrite” and “reread” the Renaissance; it is more attentive than is older Renaissance history to local and ethnic traditions and less driven by the Italian model; it questions the dominance of courtly and aristocratic tastes and values as opposed to more popular ones; it elicits from the past the suppressed voice of women by dint of various “gender politics” approaches, questioning

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narrative as well as pictorial forms in order to retrieve some of the attitudinal reality of the time vis-à-vis the image and presence of women as subjects, readers, listeners, seeking out their wider cultural contribution beyond the work of well-known humanists and writers such as Marguerite de Navarre and Vittoria Colonna, or historical figures such as Elizabeth i. Literary history has thus benefited, for example, from Foucault’s emphasis on the search for divergent and lost voices. Compendia of literary history continue to fill a pedagogical need, if only in supplying background to teachers at the elementary and secondary school level. But universities, and in this case faculties of education as well as of arts, have the responsibility to teach teachers how to read these works critically and how to present their contents to their students. What is at stake here is the opening – or closing! – of the minds of future generations to the experience of reading literature in such a way that they identify with their own but also learn to relate to that of others. Knowing how to use the textbook, the other materials of the course, and for that matter the course itself as a key to the experience of reading the texts and reacting to them, rather than as a given from which to deduct their meaning in the absolute, is part of a pedagogy of literary studies that flows from the prolonged self-examination of our discipline. The vocation of any work of literary history or theory is to teach students to problematize for themselves. This in turn calls for inductive rather than deductive methods in writing literary histories. It also suggests for literary history within a given society an instrumental role in provoking thought and further research rather than imposing a fixed, official image of its literary object. If a historical account is capable of playing such a role within its own culture, that of encouraging rather than discouraging reflection and discussion, it will by the same token have the potential to do so in a more international setting, and thus stimulate dialogue. Here I am challenging to a degree the assumption I perceive in the polysystem theory, which is that cultures will digest extraneous materials until they are assimilated, thus making it more rather than less difficult for “the Other” to be considered in its specificity. Even if this is massively so in the realm of translation, it does not have to be so in all scholarly discussion and interpretation. There is, at any rate, a field over which we have a large measure of control in that regard, and that is comparative literary history. Its internationality should not bring about the blurring of ethnic, regional, and national phenomena (the latter defined in terms of language, culture, and ethnicity rather than political borders); it should be constructed upon commonality of features and problematics. This in turn presupposes that the choice of these structuring features and problematics

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can be made with critical forethought so that the very flaws theoretical questioning has been uprooting in the practice of national literary histories will not recur at the international level. Certainly the theoretical quest has been an international one, and implicitly comparative; all major original theoretical findings have been, at varying rates, studied in many countries, and reactions to them have been international. There is comfort in that thought for possibilities of international dialogue, but there also lurks an ominous question: that of misapplied universality. The pattern of theoretical discussion has taken on the colouring of a scientific process that would carry with itself universal validation. For example, the patterns of narratology, as well as the recent discussions on fictionality and possible worlds, imply a level of philosophical consensus or convergence that risks remaining Eurocentric unless and until it can be shown to work interculturally. Thus the inclusion of more and more languages and literatures as objects of international literary study is a necessary but not a sufficient condition towards universal validation. In progressing towards the latter, pluralism, in the end, should be viewed as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, and pluralism lives within history. But pluralism is not solely the hallmark of the literatures themselves and their histories, even their comparative international history. It also inhabits the domain of theory, which itself is part of the intellectual history of a given moment. Both history and theory are tools of inquiry, and it is when their instrumentality is obscured by monological mindsets that dialogue loses ground. It is for the works of the future to keep it alive.

works cited Angenot, Marc. 1889: Un état du discours social. Montréal: Le préambule 1989. Balachov, N.I., T. Klaniczay, and A.D. Mikhailov, éds. Littérature de la Renaissance à la lumière des recherches soviétiques et hongroises. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó 1978. 11–86.

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12 History and the Power of Metaphor

My title connotes far more than a mere essay can cover; let both the title and the content simply express a set of attitudes concerning the relationship of “history” and “theory” with respect, more particularly, to the study of literature. Literary theory has been functioning as the legitimating and validating mental activity alongside our discourse, the keystone, as it were, of reflection upon literary studies; but it can justify itself in this role only as long as it does not lose sight of its own historicity. The moment it begins to construct a monument in which to enshrine its own legitimacy – that is, precisely at the pinnacle of success – it may begin to fail in its critical function. No theoretical statement, especially if it cannot be sustained at a higher level of generality, should be admitted to be absolutely self-justifying. The great impetus of literary theory in the past few decades has come from its ability to unseat even the most sacred icons, to make absolutes relative, to generate theorizing rather than theory. Classically, theoria did imply the dominance of reason, secure in its integration with cosmic harmony, whereas we have become accustomed to question severely any integrative, a priori thinking as the price to pay for epistemological correctness. My intention here is not to comment upon this tendency but

Invited paper at the conference on “Fait et fiction en histoire et théorie littéraires: colloque international de théorie littéraire,” University of Madeira, June 1992. Published in Dedalus 2 (Dec. 1992): 31–44.

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simply to call for consistency in its application, lest new self-justifying affirmations crystallize from the very safeguards that were created to forestall them. Let us take as an illustration the polysystem theory, in many ways an ideal candidate for helping us to situate the study of literary history within and among cultures, and to understand its functioning there. In fulfilling this task, the polysystem theory has analysed the processes of institutionalization and canonization of texts, as well as the obverse of these processes, so as gradually to establish a cogent and increasingly complex set of relationships that undoubtedly demonstrate recurrences in the conditioning and transformation of texts. My question concerns the risk of institutionalization of the deinstitutionalizing discourse itself, as it erects the observed patterns into “laws.” The antidote may merge with the poison! At the outset the polysystem theory proposes to account for semiotic phenomena, “sign-governed human patterns of communication” (Even-Zohar, 9), as systems rather than “conglomerates of disparate elements.” Relations replace collections of data, and the discipline gains laws that express “the diversity and complexity of phenomena” rather than merely register and classify them. Furthermore, the concept of system is enriching in that it captures, in addition to traditionally treated phenomena, non-traditional ones. As when fishermen drag a net through the sea, the system captures everything; seemingly, there is no better guarantee of factuality! Further, the idea of system has the advantage of superseding the mechanistic collection of data, and works well with the static and synchronic as well as the diachronic, dynamic approach. Because homogeneity is then necessarily lost, the system becomes a polysystem, and is by definition open. “In order,” says Even-Zohar, “for a system to function, uniformity need not be postulated. Once the historical nature of a system is recognized (a great merit from the point of view of constructing models closer to the ‘real world’), the transformation of historical objects into a series of uncorrelated a-historical occurrences is prevented” (Even-Zohar, 12). But soon the tone becomes more and more peremptory, as the inclusion of non-standard as well as standard elements evolves from being a mere consequence of the idea of polysystem to being a dogma directed against “élitism,” deemed incompatible with literary history. “As scholars committed to the discovery of the mechanisms of literature, there seems to be no way for us to avoid recognizing that any prevalent value judgements of any period are themselves an integral part of these mechanisms. No field of study, whether mildly or rigorously ‘scientific,’ can select its objects according to the norms of taste” (Even-Zohar, 13). Here the author, even as he utters a statement about what conditions all studies, fails to apply this utterance to his own studies, since avoidance of elitism also implies value-judgments.

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This example is seemingly at a distance from the osmosis between fact and fiction that is the object of our discussion, but only seemingly: history, and especially literary history, is a privileged locus for studying the convergences and divergences of fact and fiction, and according to the polysystem theory – which is by no means alone in this respect – the historical discourse like any other mode of discourse is subject to the “laws” of canonization, which will affect not only standards of historical factuality within a culture but the shaping of the historical narrative, as well as the metaphorization of selected aspects of history. Systematicity is tempting, precisely because it seems to offer itself as a means of controlling any excesses of the historical imagination; but the essay on the polysystem to which I refer affirms the polysystem to be more real than the individual phenomena upon which it works. Thus it fails to heed its own emphasis on the relative status of utterances. This observation justifies my own preference for “theorization” as opposed to theory, lest dogma return through the back door; and finally, in the matter of “fact” and “fiction” in history, it provides an example of the manner in which the pressing of phenomena into patterns can yield an illusory hyperfactuality not unlike fiction. In so doing the polysystem theory is only one of countless attempts to endow history with scientificity. They may be extraordinarily fruitful as working hypotheses and methods, yet their treatment of “fact” may be as transforming as that of the more metaphorically based theories of history I wish to mention. Whether we are speaking of Northrop Frye or Hayden White or Paul Ricoeur, any reference to the metaphorization of history, as well as, more generally, reflection on the interrelatedness of fact and fiction in history, should not be presented as somehow opposing or excluding historical research and organization of data that is and should be scientific. The discussion is about the kind of narrative statements that we can truthfully and legitimately make about the past. A logician of history such as Ankersmit states quite conclusively that: 1. There are no reliable translation rules enabling us to “project” the past on to the narrative level of its historical representation; and that modern socioscientific research into the past is an aid for historiography but cannot be substituted for it. While historical research is a scientific pursuit, the narrative writing of history is separate from it and has different goals. 2. The historian’s narratio offers us his interpretation of the past, which becomes embodied in a narrative structure. “As soon as we realize that historical uniqueness should always be associated with narrative things, and not with things in historical reality” (249), the criticism is obviated according to which

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reliable historical knowledge cannot result from inferring a unique historical phenomenon from a unique historical context and vice versa, since general knowledge of “what these historical phenomena or the historical context in which they are embedded” is required about that to which they are related. What is unique, says Ankersmit, is not what is explained but what explains. “What is unique in a narratio is not the aspects of the subject-matter under discussion, but the way these aspects are integrated or colligated into one narrative structure.” This is the basis of what Ankersmit presents as his plea in favour of historicist assumptions. 3. Finally, there is a similarity between narration and metaphorical statements, that of point of view upon reality: “historical knowledge is not knowledge in the proper sense of the word” but rather an arrangement of knowledge. “What makes historical knowledge philosophically such an interesting phenomenon lies in the fact that it is always concerned with the question of what we should or should not say on reality and not with how we should speak about reality,” that being the domain of science.

This is at the same time a sobering and a liberating analysis because it bears out the epistemological limits of historical truth claims and rebalances the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity. The richest historical account would perhaps be the one on which the greatest number of points of view have been expressed. (In this connection we should remember Douwe Fokkema’s emphasis on the criterion of consensus among interpretations, which in the human sciences has been added to correspondence and coherence as criteria for validation of truths.) Thus, rather than being simply a particular way of envisaging or writing history, metaphorization may prove to be one of history’s most stable constants because the historical imagination of the individual historian is vindicated by a range of theoretical and philosophical opinions whose wide consensus targets the fertile frontiers of subjectivity and objectivity in history. The fundamental nature of metaphorization is further corroborated by Paul Ricoeur’s concept of a metaphorical truth at the crossroads between redescription and fiction, linked to the tension that arises around the referential relationship of a metaphorical statement to reality: “In service to the poetic function, metaphor is that strategy of discourse by which language divests itself of its function of direct description in order to reach the mythic level where its function of discovery is set free” (1977, 247). This statement is made in the context of a discussion on poetic discourse, but it also has implications for historical discourse because such concepts as the reduction of distance between “invention and discovery” (246) and indeed between subjective and objective approaches to truth apply there also and are amply dem-

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onstrated in such works as Histoire et vérité and The Reality of the Historical Past. The many insights brought by Ricoeur to the discussion of objectivity and subjectivity in history are difficult to summarize, but they include selectiveness among events and the imposition of rational frameworks that are not devoid of resemblance to the construction of scientific hypotheses; the overhauling of the concept of causation based less on series of events than on holistic patterns; the historian’s ability to both recognize the distance of the past and endow a section of the past for the reader, by dint of historical imagination, with “une conscience d’éloignement, de profondeur temporelle”; and the overcoming of that distance, which includes the impossibility of re-entering the mentalities of human beings of past eras, by contemplating with sympathy the world that was theirs and constructing an image of it that will be part of ours. Here the historian departs from the scientist, and yet I do not think I am stretching Ricoeur’s theory of history if I say that it is precisely in this aspect of historical activity that the historian is most specifically a historian and, by adapting methodology to purpose, fulfils a scientific mandate. Ricoeur also recalls, when it comes to transferring into text the historian’s vision of the past, the relevance of Frye’s concept of the rhetorical analogy between literature and reality, mythos and mimèsis, the poetic and the hypothetical (1977, 245–6). After discussing the role of metaphor in speculative discourse, Ricoeur concludes: “What is given to thought in this way by the ‘tensional’ truth of poetry is the most primordial, most hidden dialectic – the dialectic that reigns between the experience of belonging as a whole and the power of distanciation that opens up the space of speculative thought” (313). The case of historical discourse is more problematic with respect to linguistic approximation of reality because of the constraints imposed by past objects, but it also serves to challenge as well as to expand “the dynamism of metaphorical utterance.” What Ricoeur calls the nomological model in historiography carries its own semiotic constraints not unlike those of fictionality, and demanding “logicization” and “dechronologization.” “[L’explication nomologique] ne peut se substituer à la compréhension narrative, mais [peut] seulement être interpolée en vertu de l’adage: expliquer plus, c’est comprendre mieux. Et si l’explication nomologique ne pouvait se substituer à la comprehension narrative, c’est parce qu’elle emprunte à celle-ci les traits qui préservent le caractère irréductiblement historique de l’histoire” (1983, 54). Moreover, “dechronologization” is simply the obverse of logicization, and both together manifest the non-temporal character of the deep structures of narrative. Narrative therefore tends to impose itself upon historical discourse but at the risk of de-emphasizing

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the uniqueness of single historical events. What attracts Ricoeur in the symbolizing quality of the historical narrative is the creation of new meaning for the reader. Time remains the ultimate referent, but the imagination grasps the metaphorical truth, and in this process the past of mankind stands in a renewed relationship to its present and future. In summary, historical narrative is an allegory of temporality that reinstills meaning into time. Literature and history furthermore share the referentiality of time, which in the eyes of Hayden White promises a more exciting revelation than could be expected from the fictionality-factuality opposition: “Ricoeur’s insistence that history and literature share a common ‘ultimate referent’ represents a considerable advancement over previous discussions of the relations between history and literature based on the supposed opposition of ‘factual’ to ‘fictional’ discourse. Just by virtue of its narrative form, historical discourse resembles such literary fictions as epics, novels, short stories, and so on, and Barthes and the Annalistes are justified in stressing those resemblances. But instead of regarding this as a sign of narrative history’s weakness, Ricoeur interprets it as a strength” (1978, 175). In a wide sense, metaphorization might be considered a major mechanism at work in the historians’ own perception of the past, in their speculations as they compare, reassemble, and articulate single phenomena into more general vistas, and in their historiographical practice. Metaphorization is also a historiographical weapon used, consciously or unconsciously, to mould historical events into ideological examples. One of my favourite instances of such use is the eighteenth-century reception of the work of Jan Amos Comenius. Today he is studied mostly as one of the ancestors of progressive education, as the initiator of illustrated books for children, as an early champion of universal education, as a reformer of school systems in a range of European countries, as the author of numerous philosophical and pedagogical works emphasizing intellectual discovery from the earliest moments of childhood. But at least two Enlightenment authors, Bayle and Diderot, treat Comenius with contempt and anger in their respective dictionaries because of the mystical basis of his world-view, perceived by them as fanatical. In both their accounts the biography of Comenius is foreshortened in the years he devoted to pedagogical reform and abundantly lengthened in the last period of his life, during which both authors accuse him of shamelessly exploiting his Dutch patrons. It is clear that, almost independently of, and even despite entire bodies of texts in literary as well as intellectual history, authors can become symbols of tendencies, targets, and, as required, saints or martyrs.

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We could similarly consider historical phenomena that have assumed either universal or local meaning beyond the original occurrence that constitutes them. They are both fact and fiction. Students of French history know that the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 is such an event: far from being filled with victims of the arbitrary power of the “lettres de cachet,” the fortress was sparsely populated with petty criminals, some of whom were held there at the request of their families. For a Czech the battle of the White Mountain of 1621 represents the defeat of Bohemia at the hands of the Habsburgs, followed by what the Czech historical consciousness perceives (and continually replenishes with meaning) as three hundred years of tyranny, although the Austro-Hungarian regime was in fact far from brutal. Dates can have such meaning: the terse expression “sixty-eight” immediately brings to mind the multiplicity of events that in 1968 shattered several countries in quite different ways, though they all had in common the involvement of university students, the questioning of the structures of academe and those of the human sciences. It is not impossible – and by way of such phenomena as Tel Quel it is quite likely – that the intensification of literary theory studies is a distant product of those events. Certainly the naming of periods of history or literary history often has the particular quality of isolating a fact or cluster of facts and tying them to a set of meanings that may or may not have been present in the minds of the actual actors. The expression “the Holocaust” has assumed a universal and catalytic quality that first of all has been pulling together powerfully the separate episodes, times, places and variants of Nazi terror but has also begun to connote other instances of genocide. One of the reasons that in English at least the expression “early modern” has begun to replace the combination of Middle Ages and Renaissance is that both these are rife with ideologically loaded preconceptions, not the least of which is the relationship between the two chronological components themselves and the continuity between them, the discontinuity – that is, the advent of the Renaissance – being in a number of cases the self-proclaimed message of a small, humanistic, court-oriented elite very knowledgeably institutionalizing itself. These examples are but elementary illustrations of the universal relatedness of fact and fiction that has been noted since classical antiquity. Why is it important at this particular time to probe those forever uncertain frontiers? In a recent lecture A. Kibédi-Varga asserted that “nous vivons une époque pan-rhétorique où tout est rhétorisable,” a time in which many basic legitimating metanarratives are in crisis and the truthclaims of entire disciplines appear to have become negotiable or at least interpretable, where it is therefore particularly important to trace the

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limits of that interpretability. Narration becomes argumentative, and argumentation in its turn requires narration. Literary history, and more generally speaking history, are in this perspective brought into the orbit of fictionality as forms of discourse. We have become rather used to a division of labour in which literary history in some of its more positivistic, “fact”-oriented forms has been allocated the residual role of representing that in the past that can no longer enter into dialogue with our present and has therefore lost its necessity, while the science of discourse has the ability to do so because it deals with the past as discourse. But once we have regained understanding of literary history as discourse of a time and place (which also includes considering the positivistic histories of national literatures as discourses of certain times and places, useful to analyse as such as a matter of historical understanding of a now well-circumscribed phenomenon), then we are also free to continue the historical discourse upon literature in full knowledge of what in its narrativity is argumentative relative to our own time and need for representation, and of its being a certain kind of construction (rather than the elusive shadow of reconstruction). Hayden White adds an important dimension to the discussion about history in his analysis of what constitutes the need for narrativity itself with his distinction between narrating and narrativizing. The latter is developed as a response to the perceived need for endowing the past with the markers of fictionality (I would say that it is almost as if the historical reality the historian seeks to approximate is also a possible world): “The very distinction between real and imaginary events that is basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction presupposes a notion of reality in which the ‘true’ is identified with the ‘real’ only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity” (1987, 6). Historical narrativity, according to White, is increasingly marked by authority, the social system, and its laws as it advances from annals to chronicles to historiography; thus narrativity embodied in the historical discourse is value-laden, and “narrativizing discourse serves the purpose of moralizing judgements” (24). Here White is not speaking of a history that attempts to let the past tell its own story but one where events of the past are made to “display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that can only be imaginary” and whose narrativity is imposed upon it by a contemporary scheme of values, not one stemming from the historical past. This is precisely why such historians as Braudel do not favour narrative forms of historiography and why we have a number of schools of history preferring documentary and even quantitative methods to the

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exigencies and deceptions of narrativity. It should also be remembered that the structuralists and poststructuralists viewed narrative as a conduit of ideology, and this view includes the thought that the form of the narrative is an instrument of power. In the “history of history” this marks a serious divergence in terms of theoretical stances as well as practices. I began by suggesting openness to a typology of approaches, provided of course that they are not mutually exclusive. White’s theory of the historical narrative uses imagination as a positive element in bringing historiography to life; this does not exclude – and in the spirit of Ricoeur I would say it includes and is complementary with – close attention to precise knowledge of the materials of history, which place constraints upon the imagination. But the resulting historical text, according to White, yields as different an image of the past as the poem does of ordinary reality: “Precisely insofar as the historical narrative endows sets of real events with the kinds of meaning found otherwise only in myth and literature, we are justified in regarding it as a product of allegoresis. Therefore, rather than regard every historical narrative as mythic or ideological in nature, we should regard it as allegorical, that is, as saying one thing and meaning another” (1987, 45). That is going far indeed, when you consider that saying one thing and meaning another is Riffaterre’s definition of poetry itself! But White is also saying that history is not myth nor is it literature; it has in common with them, however, that the story it tells generates possibilities of meaning for the reader beyond the facts woven into the narrative. New meaning is produced; the reality of the real events of the past is not thereby challenged but reutilized. One of the most important consequences for literary and interdisciplinary studies is the thought that histories are not “about events but also about the possible sets of relationships that those events can be demonstrated to figure. These sets of relationships are not however immanent in the events themselves … Here they are present as the modes of relationship conceptualized in the myth, fable and folklore, scientific knowledge, religion, and literary art, and the historian’s own culture” (1978, 94). Ultimately, according to White, the role of historical discourse, co-equal in this respect with other creations of the human mind but specific in its singularity and temporality, is thus a highly symbolical one. In the case of Northrop Frye, history per se seldom plays such a role. He differentiates between verbal narratives in the metaphorical phase of language, when the gods serve as metaphors; in the metonymic phase, when narrative forms are conceptual; and the descriptive phase, where “the sequence in the narrative is suggested by the sequential features of whatever is being described” (31–2). Gibbon’s

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Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire mostly exemplifies the third phase, by relating the fortunes of the Roman Empire, yet also carries within itself (and its very title) a narrative principle that is Gibbon’s mythos. Frye’s commitment is indeed to the narrative principle that shapes history and gives it intelligibility. Recent information about his unpublished papers illustrates this: in his private notebooks he had drafted, but obviously he never published, a history of English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet his sense of historicity is unquestionable; his schemes unfold in time, but it is the time of the literary works responding to one another and, metaphorically, to their surrounding cultures. I do not know of a perfect model of renewed literary history that would either secretly carry as a hypogram some particular metaphor, or would openly acknowledge its need for one. It is, at any rate, incumbent upon us to widen our concept of what actually constitutes a work of literary history (for example, Northrop Frye’s The Great Code and Words with Power should qualify, not because of the unpublished historical project of his youth, nor because of his prestige as a thinker, but because a wider range of formats and programs for envisaging the historical development of literature is needed). Inclusiveness with regard to types of texts would also be a criterion; here the studies inspired by the polysystem theory are relevant, with their emphasis on heterogeneity and contacts between cultures. Perhaps also, although I think that a one-year span is no more scientific a basis than any other chronological span – Marc Angenot has written an extensive monograph about the year 1889 – works that are based on the theory of social discourse would qualify as works of literary history. Certainly a maximum of openness towards the spectrum of genres would prevail, as would intercultural dialogue and the phenomenon of emergence. But emergence is not fundamentally or necessarily geographical: it is transgressiveness that has been the motor of much rewriting of history so that it may become open to “other” voices. What perhaps needs to be revised altogether is the expected globalizing format; the analysis of a micro-example might bring as much light to bear upon a period as would a work neatly divided by genres, themes, and so on. Works such as Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-fashioning and Cadava’s collective compendium Who Comes after the Subject? fill a crucial need in engaging the reader to strive to complete the picture for those times and places they do not specifically discuss. They are profoundly historical in that they problematize in time and thus problematize time; they do not cover neatly mapped-out areas of the past, nationally or internationally. Perhaps, in the global village such

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container-like divisions of time are also a thing of the past. Paradoxically, in the face of globalization I would envisage a greater place for the individual subject as the responsible locus of historical discourse, rooted in our present history. On a theoretical or philosophical plane, we might say that the balance of subjectivity and objectivity has shifted considerably as a result of the reappraisal of the nature and function of the fictional, so that the hermeneutic status of the historical narrative is also one of its great social assets.

works cited Angenot, Marc, Jean Bessière, Douwe Fokkema, and Eva Kushner, eds. “Questions épistemologiques.” In Théorie littéraire: problèmes et perspectives. Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1989. 330–1. Ankersmit, F.R. Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. The Hague: Nijhoff 1983. Even-Zohar, Itamar. “Polysystem Theory.” Polysystem Studies, Poetics Today 11, no. 1 (1990). Frye, Northrop. The Great Code. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1982. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1977. – Temps et récit. Vol. 2. Paris: Éditions Seuil 1983. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1978. – The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1987.

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13 Comparative Literary History in the Era of Difference

How compatible is the intellectual project of a comparative literary history with a postmodern culture? My title signals a potential contradiction from which comparative literary history may, or may not, emerge as still a creative and stimulating area within literary studies and the humanities at large. The contradiction arises if, embracing difference not only as a fait accompli but as a value sustaining of cultural identities, we set up the comparative viewpoint and activity as, somehow, its philosophical opposite, because of its inevitably universalizing frame of mind (or perhaps merely its universalizing image). In a well-known article on the emergence of newer literatures Wlad Godzich has deconstructed the comfortable and comforting concept of a benevolent comparative literature capable of reconciling differences among national literatures and giving them cosy supranational homes as, subterraneously, a conceptual robbery that despoils the national, especially the emergent cultures of the full impact of their difference. This is a warning to be taken seriously because the comparatist tends to look for historical commonalities, or may claim commonalities for theoretical reasons. The editors of a recent Contemporary Literature of Asia point out that Fredric Jameson equalizes a large number of non-Western narratives as allegorically embodying a Third World situation, and that this

Inaugural lecture, congress of the Brazilian Comparative Literature Association, Rio de Janeiro, Aug. 1996. Published in Canones e contextos (Rio de Janeiro: abralic 1998), 1:43–50.

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may misrepresent the multiplicity and differentiation of countless Asian cultures. Jameson’s “national allegory” concept presupposes that, as he says, “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (quoted in Biddle et al., 5). But is this really an either/or situation? Can we not accept that, at a very general level, there are many countries in the world where realistic stories of exploitation of the poor might serve as allegories of entire nations and even of the plight of humanity, but, at the same time, that different nations, different cultures have told these stories at distinct times in their histories in ways particular to themselves? My sense of this multilayered reality enables me to hope not only that the literatures that are our objects can communicate with one another in systemic ways but that our study of them can bring out the commonalities without oppressing the differences. Let us take as an example the experience of the editors of Contemporary Literature of Asia as they face the tremendous linguistic variety of both South and South East Asia – just Malaysia and Indonesia together possess about three hundred different languages and dialects – in combination with waves of influences and interactions of different religions, of different processes of colonization, decolonization, postcolonial experience. The editors, having surveyed the production of poetry and fiction over the past decades in all the countries of both South and South East Asia, conclude as follows: “The different national cultures, linguistic communities, and literary traditions intermesh in a variety of ways, creating commonalities across the entire region while at the same time asserting their distinctive identities […] Each South and South Asian language thus takes us into a different world […] Within this network of connections and discontinuities, each language world seems to have specific literary tendencies” (Biddle, 25). For example, Hindi poetry inclines towards more political themes; Marathi poetry cultivates the aesthetic. Indian English fiction tends to lean towards liberal humanism, Bengali fiction towards left-wing politics. But there emerges a cultural whole distinct from, let us say, that of the Caribbean, the Middle East, or East Asia. The editors link South and South East Asia in this cultural whole, despite all its diversity, in terms of the following general characteristics: “a predominance of social and psychological realism in prose fiction; a realistic representation and criticism of social, economic and political problems in newly founded nations; an attempt to capture the unique characteristics of various local and native cultures […] in transition from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’; and a critique of social injustice, particularly in the context of class, gender and power relations” (25–6).

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We can thus telescope the dialectic way in which difference works, because self-definition necessarily implies exploring the boundaries of the other and necessarily involves us in history. Now let us attempt also to telescope another huge subject: the manner in which the awareness of and preference for difference in our episteme has been affecting literary history and how literary history has responded. To that end, let us first glance at the history of literary history in comparative literature studies. For many decades and in many places comparative literature coincided with comparative literary history, so important was the study of historically ascertainable literary relations; this dominance has fallen apart, and its break-up elicits constant nostalgia for other forms of relatedness. René Wellek’s paper at the 1970 icla congress in Bordeaux, “The Fall of Literary History,” seems in retrospect to have criticized existing practices and methodologies in terms of antiquarian and positivist tendencies, and misguided applications on the part of literary historians of such concepts as causation, time, fact, relationship of subject and object, rather than to have specifically questioned the conceptual possibility of the monster that is the conjunction of the thing called literature and the thing called history, both so rife with theoretical quirks. About the same time Hans Robert Jauss criticized literary history on a number of counts. He proposed to make it more dialogical vis-à-vis the reader by factoring aesthetic reception importantly into the very nature of historical objectivity; to use the reader’s horizon of expectation, say in terms of genre, as frame of reference; to measure audience reaction as also being part of history; to think of literary texts as authors’ responses to questions in the mind of the readership of their day, thus combining reception history with Gadamer’s concept of the history of impact; and other theoretical directives, many of which have indeed been tested since Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, and either integrated or rejected. My own purpose is not to retrace the history of comparative literary history in the past twenty-five years but to explain briefly how I reached the perspective I am proposing today. I answered Wellek’s “Fall of Literary History” at the eight icla congress in Budapest with a text entitled “Chute ou renouvellement de l’histoire littéraire?” (1980), expressing the conviction that a renewal could occur whereby the discipline would take into account all the ongoing theoretical questioning and come out alive and enriched. One of the many steps on the way to change was a rehistoricizing of the experience of structuralism when it took a second breath (with Lévi-Strauss, for example), readmitting the diachronic dimension within structure. Another was a recognition, in the wake of poststructuralism and deconstruction, of the subjective and intersubjective in the experience of literary historicity,

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as against the abstract monumentalizing of literary history; this was expressed by several scholars in the 1984 proceedings of a conference on Renewals in the Theory of Literary History. I continued to draw attention to this vitality in two circumstances and directions in particular, first of all in showing the extraordinary and necessary plurality of literary history, which, whether we theoretically accept it or not, goes right on serving as a major storehouse of the symbolical self-representations of cultures. But it has more than survived; rather than remaining an archeology it has become (and has increasingly recognized itself to be) a participant among others, no longer a hierarchically dominant participant by dint of an illusory scientificity but a form of discourse taking its place self-reflexively among other forms of contemporary discourse, which means plurality of voices, fragmentation, epistemological selfdoubt, presence in the present of the postmodern toppling of all configurations. But then one of the remaining questions is whether such discourse, even as it encapsulates cultural identities – especially emerging or politically threatened ones – will cultivate opacity vis-à-vis others. Literary history can be self-defensive; it can be arbitrarily ideological; it can be and has been wilfully falsified. Under the title “Literary History as Dialogue among Nations” I drew attention to the need for international communicability among national historical discourses. Literary history may be discourse, but let us use this concept carefully, not as “just discourse”: as a responsible tool for teaching and communication that, even as it knows itself to be constructing, does so in full awareness of the manner in which the historical narrative might be perceived by close or distant addressees. That literary historians are fully aware of the opportunities of difference and responding to them is a fully acquired fact, visible in the structure of much new literary historiography, which in many quarters appears as a liberated historiography. This is exemplified in an Introduction to Modern Polish Literature published in the United States in 1964 for “the general reader in English-speaking countries” (Gillon & Krzyzanowski, 7). Before we even get to the table of contents we feel like American tourists given a Berlitz manual so as to endow them with a product with which they can feel comfortable. In a similar spirit (I find the pedagogical intent laudable, but potentially burdened with ideology) the aim of the work “is to offer the American reader a fairly representative selection of Polish fiction and poetry, written during the past seven decades.” What is “fairly representative” depends entirely on the editors. That is the very crux of the anthological and encyclopedic tendencies, both of which constantly strive to readjust the canon while avoiding a fully narrative history. Why would these editors (and countless others) wish to avoid a fully narrative literary history? Apart

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from the wish to let literary texts “speak for themselves” – which in itself is a loaded metaphor – there is an inherent historical reason in the case of this particular work – namely, the lack of communication at that time with Communist Poland, and the rarity of books coming out to be translated. Necessarily the product would be incomplete, but the anthological structure would at least partly remedy the incompleteness, and would in fact accomplish two things: go part of the way towards establishing continuity with the period preceding Communism, and bring out the Polish character of literature in the presence of Communism. There is a further political motivation: the editors are glad, not only to offer readers this anthology in the absence of comprehensive works but “also because Poland is now celebrating the millenium of her unbroken continuity as a nation and of her allegiance to the western cultural heritage” (17). The editors are intent upon showing that the recent production under Communism is not really relevant to that Western cultural heritage. The production of the Communist period, they affirm, will not be missed because cultural continuity is preserved without it. (Subsequent history shows this to be the case – with nuances – wherever an ideological mould has been imposed, not only because the mould is removed but because readers decide more freely what to read.) The historical summary preceding the anthology itself extends the bias we have noted in at least two ways. It emphasizes the Western mentality of Poland from the start, as opposed to other Slavic nations – a debatable point. But mainly it draws emphatic comparisons between major Polish works and those of “really” Western ones (Western being a compliment here!), to the disadvantage of the former. For example, the Polish seventeenth century, though inferior (!) in comparison with the Golden Age (of Spain, of course), still maintained a reputable level, but the first half of the eighteenth, the so-called Saxon period, “must be considered a time of political decay and intellectual stagnation” (20). Some improvement is noted when Komarski shows signs of being guided by the French Enlightenment. Not a word about Poland’s leading role in the sixteenth century in the area of tolerance and religious freedom. In the Romantic era, the editors hasten to mention, Mickiewicz “followed the vogue set by Byron” (21) in creating Konrad Wallenrod (1828). Norwid is allowed to “anticipate some of the French Symbolist poets” (23). When it comes to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the editors relinquish this superficial comparativism to some extent, following more sensitively the dialectic of continued Romantic idealism and critical, even ironical sophistication. They argue that (if one digs a little beneath war and post-war surface themes) the character of Polish liter-

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ature did not basically change under social realism. The power of irony – that of a Wazyk, for example, in “A poem for adults” – overrules the dictatorship of literary movements. Thus the Polish difference overcomes one of the most powerful levelling differences in the history of literature and art, to remain essentially itself. It happens that one of the world’s great poets, Czeslaw Milosz, has written a history of Polish literature. Professor as well as poet, he wanted it to be didactically oriented. This intention cannot be overstressed because, whatever we can say about the degree of its epistemological validity, literary history continues more than ever to play a pedagogical part in two ways: as a consciousness-raising and teaching tool within cultural identities and, beyond these, as an instrument of mutual discovery. But when it comes to this latter function, difference can (and often does) become an ideological weapon rather than an instrument of self-discovery and mutual discovery. Milosz manages to argue many points without imposing an ideology. As a professor he believes in supplying information; every chapter begins with background information consequent upon the belief that the historical and cultural context in which the literature of a given period arose can be couched and transmitted in a cognitively acceptable manner. Then, for several of the earlier periods, Milosz deals first with literature in Latin, then in Polish. This is where the challenge of balancing “objectivity” and “subjectivity” comes in. In the face of the massive existence of literature in Latin, the strength of the vernacular literature and its essential Polishness must be demonstrated, not just affirmed. Here Milosz’s “agenda” consists not only in this demonstration of strength but also in freeing the image of Polish literature from the stereotype under which it labours, namely, that it is predominantly Romantic and Catholic – commonplaces, in fact, of relatively recent origin. The vernacular, stifled for a long time by Latin, the language of the Church, won its ascendancy in Poland primarily thanks to the religious controversies engendered first by the ideas of Jan Hus, then by Luther’s and Calvin’s. “Poland of the ’Golden Age’ was largely a Protestant country” (Milosz, xvi). Since then the heritage of intellectual rebelliousness, which Milosz stresses, has never been entirely lost, and was transmitted through the Enlightenment and the democrats of the nineteenth century to the liberal intelligentsia of today. Another cliché Milosz attempts to correct is that the history of Polish letters is ruled by an emotional moralism, whereas according to him the strong presence of Christian ethics coexists with anti-clericalism and much scepticism vis-à-vis dogmas. Of the freedom of the literary historian to propound such a viewpoint Milosz admits: “although the author of a textbook should be as objective as possible, this does not

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mean that he has to become an impersonal machine computing data. He brings into his enterprise his own personal frame of reference, visible in the very selection of his material, and in the stress he puts on certain personalities and trends” (xvi). Consequently, our poet is unafraid to state that his search is not purely for aesthetic values. “Literature, to me, appears as a series of moments in the life of the species, coagulated into language and, thus, made accessible for reflection by posterity” (xvi). Not indiscriminately but decisively, Milosz as literary historian will listen for the human voice, even for the crazy, the funny, the bizarre. In these few pages he has given a major boost to difference: difference vis-à-vis traditional literary history, vis-à-vis panEuropean stereotypes that would predetermine the image of Polish literature in the international arena; difference in terms of embracing all the internal paradoxes, such as the co-existence in Polish culture of vitality and apathy, tolerance and morbid nationalism; difference in terms of diverging from rigid periodization concepts arising elsewhere and materializing in specific ways and at divergent times in Poland – say, Baroque or Enlightenment. One of the astonishing aspects of the new freedom of literary history has been the detaching of the periodizations of more “junior” from those of more “senior” literatures, and the rethinking of the former in terms of their own development as perceived by their historians and as documented by much innovative research. In this process historians also claim, and appropriately, the right to re-examine traditional techniques and methodologies from the standpoint of their instrumental values. To the concept of generation as revived by Alberto Varillas Montenegro in his recent La literatura peruana del siglo xix one might initially react with scepticism, remembering the fate of this concept in French literary history, with its lack of precision and theoretical justification. But Montenegro makes generation a much more precise tool for the exploration of a period that, according to him, has been neglected (not unlike, until recently, nineteenth-century Quebec literature). Montenegro explores the history of the concept of generation (including Ortega y Gasset’s treatment of it) in an attempt to free it from pseudo-scientificity. He sees it closely linked with the rhythm of the human life-span itself, as well as with the sense writers themselves have of a common experience and, often, a common program. He warns that among generational groups as in life there are interferences, overlaps, and gaps; the value of the concept is purely pragmatic. He greets with joy the fact that close research identifies, by contiguity with known writers, unknown ones who otherwise might remain unknown. Montenegro’s detailed tables enable us, in summary, to articulate the sequence of groupings as follows (taking into account birth

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dates as well as publication dates): up to 1824, neo-classicismo y primeras noticias del romanticismo; 1825–60, romanticismo; 1860– 80, secunda generación romántica, primeras notícias parnasianas y naturalistas; 1880–95, Parnaso y naturalismo; 1895–1910, plenitud del modernismo. Though the concept of generation may initially be fragile, it leads the author, in his third chapter, to abundant discoveries of information the coherence of which helps his hypothesis towards historiographical credibility. More generally speaking, the field of periodization is a healthy testing-ground for literary history. It was one of the first areas within traditional literary history to be challenged because of its naïvely mechanical concept of time and evolution. That was part of what Lima da Costa calls false universalization – in this case, undue application of period concepts that ignore or even oppress the temporal reality of a given culture. The Argentinian Comparative Literature Association devoted its fourth congress (1987) to periodization precisely because the concepts implicit in a periodization will structure the very object of a national history of literature. The topics included not only production of literature but circulation and reception as well (Camara, 191–200). Before attempting to construct the history of a literature, Amalia Iniesta Camara advises, establish first of all its limits in time, space, principles of inclusion (e.g., place of birth of writers, language used, and so on). Necessarily, this selection will determine the problematics at hand. Decide also about unpublished versus published works, traditional versus non-traditional genres, oral versus written ones. Make sure that good critical editions of the early materials are generated, that relevant unpublished documentation (say, the correspondence of Cortázar) is published. There is even a suggestion that genetic studies comparing, for example, Borgés’s published texts with earlier manuscripts corrected by him might yield fruitful results. Make sure also that periodical literature is included along with literature in book form. Here I might interject two thoughts: first, that Quebec scholarship of recent decades, with its wealth of critical editions, has certainly followed the principles invoked by Amalia Camara towards documenting the early stages of a literature; secondly, that in the future the Internet will be helpful in attaining the completion of such endeavours even as it adds to the literary corpus itself! In summary, periodization becomes articulation, and articulation must fairly represent the culture to be portrayed. Preconceived period concepts will give way to adherence to cultural realities as shown by thorough inventories of texts. This in turn presupposes research into the circulation and reception of these texts – for example, with respect to nodes of communication such as periodicals, and editorial decision-making processes.

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Has difference really penetrated the substrata of literary history in our time? One possible answer is offered by David Perkins in Is Literary History Possible? Among several important aggiornamenti he proposes a broad typology: the narrative model, which by and large belongs to the past of literary history, and the rather postmodern encyclopedic model. A creative example appears in Les Littératures de langue allemande depuis 1945, which faces head on the need to anthologize: “Nous avons, pour notre part, choisi de proposer un ouvrage qui, sans prétendre être une histoire littéraire ni une anthologie, relève pourtant des deux genres” (Tunner and Claudon, 5). In the book, neither genre dominates the other. The editors have chosen a more personal contact with a literature that for the French reader is exogenous. Rather than classify or impose a hierarchy, they proceed chronologically, by authors’ birth dates, and thus decompartmentalize and denationalize, since the language grouping includes writers from Switzerland and Austria as well as Germany and, importantly, writers from both former East and former West Germany. The unity of the work is pragmatic; it is that of the period beginning in 1945, a date of undisputed relevance to all, which spares the editors the need to posit a new unity of German literature but enables the reader to problematize it. Perkins’ division into narrative and encyclopedic models portrays two extremes. The narrative model fulfils the conscious, or perhaps even the unconscious desire of the historian for some kind of continuity; by dint of emplotment the history becomes a story of which the historian is the organizer if not the inventor. It has direction. The narrator’s creation is potentially more important in this model than the past to be recalled; thus, under the guise of objectivity, much subjectivity is allowed to enter. (Traditional literary history prided itself upon its objectivity in supplying background information; the selection of it, however, was always the historian’s own.) The encyclopedic model, which Perkins links with postmodernism, is characterized by heterogeneity and discontinuity of structure; whether written by an individual or collectively, the work may consist of detached pieces that have no necessary thematic consistency with each other; it can be an anthology – the alphabetical order being logically a haphazard one – of fragments, each of which represents a subjective grasp of the material. For example, there was produced in former Czechoslovakia – surprisingly in the sixties, under Communist sponsorship – a textbook of humanistic Czech poetry, Enchiridion renatae poesis (Rukov8. humanistického básnictví), which lists in alphabetical order and analyses in great detail the work of hundreds of humanists of Bohemia and Moravia, their dates, biographies, works, themes. The uniting principle is that all worked in the sixteenth century within

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Czech territory on Latin and Greek poetry; inclusion does not depend on whether their work was published or remained in manuscript form, as long as they contributed to the development of humanistic studies. This type of work fits Perkins’ encyclopedic model perfectly: each entry constitutes a unit, and no artificial overall statement, no metanarrative is proposed by way of linkage. In my own view, neither the narrative nor the encyclopedic model has struck the right balance between the past to be structured and the structuring process. The historian’s will to narrate cannot be eliminated from the freedom of the field, which it can in fact enrich by means of intelligent constructions. Also, the reader – still often neglected in the history of literary history – should be credited with the ability to override the opposition of the two models, to make them part of an ongoing re-examination of the literary past, reshaping his or her own vision of it. Thus, no work of literary history need be discarded only because it is either narrative or encyclopedic. It can rejoin the diversity of the whole field; discriminating readers will know how to integrate any work into their vision and to bring into dialectical opposition, with the two models, the past and the present of literary historiography. Difference is not just the postmodern stance; it is also the indispensable catalyst in awakening the very motivation to perceive a history in the midst of change. As comparativist researchers, we are responsible for reading not just what fulfils our desire but what may include tendencies still developing and unrealized. For all these reasons I would call for the acceptance of the de facto openness and diversity of the field of literary history as we do for that of literature itself, not just as a necessity but as an opportunity, so that a range of theoretical and methodological endeavours is at all times possible within comparative literature, and scholars can “plug in” relevantly in many locations of historical research. The most irrelevant tendency would be to monumentalize for the sake of monumentalizing. This means that large international undertakings such as the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages are not excluded on account of their monumental size; they can continue to be included if they are polyphonic, programmatic (that is, open), and, as Valdés and Hutcheon propose, interdisciplinary. By contrast, a history that is monumentalizing and narrative would be excluded from my field of vision if it presented itself dogmatically as definitive and complete on a given topic and echoed the value-system of the writers (e.g., Chamard on the Pléiade, or De Sanctis on Italian literature). I envisage literary history as a cultural practice among others, inclusive of a range of historiographical endeavours, some very

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comprehensive in scope and some restricted, some national or regional and some international. It is this entire field, with this variety of magnitudes and approaches, that constitutes literary history today. Literary history is not a story of monuments but a multiplicity of projects potentially in communication with one another. Does that mean that anything belongs? On the contrary: if, among the criteria of validity, universality of application has become less urgent, or at least less worrisome, it has not disappeared as a problematic, nor has the question of criteria of validity disappeared from the agenda. This only means that the literary historian will not avoid but will on the contrary welcome tears in the fabric, gaps, divergences, discontinuities, always doing justice to the documentation that in turn embodies the cultural and intercultural realities under examination. The resulting historiography may not yield vast certainties, but it will lead to verifiable hypotheses calling for comparative treatment within a world system of literatures that, after all, is itself a fruitful working hypothesis. (Some of the greatest scientific truths, including relativity, began as hypotheses.) In this essay philosophical and epistemological questioning of literature has been only implicit, but let us not forget that at the intersection of history and fiction as conceived, for example, by Paul Ricoeur, or of history and metaphor as conceived by Hayden White, there lies a golden opportunity for literary history to adorn the history of human time with that of imagination.

works cited Biddle, Arthur W., Gloria Bien, and Vinay Dharwadker, eds. Contemporary Literature of Asia. Upper Saddle River: Blair Press-Prentice Hall 1996. Camara, Amalia Iniesta. “Reflexiones intorno de las posibilidades de une historia integral de la literatura argentina.” In La periodización de la literatura argentina. Actas del iv congreso nacional de literatura argentina, ed. Carlos Orlando. Cuyo: Universidad nacional 1988. 2:191–200. Chamard, Henri. Histoire de la Pléiade. 4 vols. Paris: Didier 1939, 1963. De Sanctis, Francesco. History of Italian Literature. Trans. Joan Redfern. New York: Barnes and Noble 1968. Gillon, Adam, and Ludwik Krzyzanowski, eds. Introduction to Modern Polish Literature: An Anthology of Fiction and Poetry. New York: Twayne Publishers 1964. Godzich, Wlad. “Emergent Literatures and Comparative Literature.” In The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, ed. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1988. Jameson, Fredric. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text (Fall 1986). Jauss, Hans Robert. Literaturgeschichte als Provokation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1970.

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Kushner, Eva. “Chute ou renouvellement de l’histoire littéraire?” In Actes du viii e congrès de l’Association internationale de littérature comparée. Stuttgart: Erich Bieber, Kunst und Wissen 1980. 2:475–84. – “Perspectives sur l’histoire littéraire.” In Actes du xii e congrès de l’Association internationale de littérature comparée. Espaces et frontières. Munich: Iudicium Verlag 1990. 1:28–40. – “Literary History as Dialogue among Nations.” Néohelicon 20, no. 2 (1993): 29–41. – ed. Renewals in the Theory of Literary History / Renouvellements dans la théorie de l’histoire littéraire. Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada 1984. Milosz, Czeslaw. The History of Polish Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press 1969, 1983. Montenegro, Alberto Varillas. La literatura peruana nel siglo xix. Lima: Pontificia universidad católica 1992. Orlando, Carlos, ed. La periodización de la literatura argentina. Actas del iv congreso nacional de literatura argentina. Cuyo: Universidad nacional 1988. See especially Amalia Iniesta Camara, “Reflexiones intorno de las posibilidades de une historia integral de la literatura argentina,” 2:191–200. Perkins, David. Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1993. Tunner, Erika, and Francis Claudon, eds. Les Littératures de langue allemande depuis 1945. Paris: Nathan-Université 1994. Valdés, Mario, and Linda Hutcheon. “Rethinking Literary History – Comparatively.” acls Occasional Paper no. 27, American Council of Learned Societies, 1994.

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part three History and Early Modern Subjectivity

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14 Distant Voices: The Call of Early Modern Studies

How does the postmodern literary historian make contact with the premodern world? Much present-day theorization regarding literary history (and quite relevant to history in general) begins with that question. I use the expression postmodern not as a philosophical or aesthetic label but by way of recognizing that we live in postmodernity, remembering that the status of this concept is itself problematic in that it resists being regarded as a period comparable to previous ones, sees itself more as a set of conditions of variable temporal dimensions, weakening and dissolving the very fabric of comfortable generalization. Thus, more than ever before, historiography becomes an individual creation and an individual responsibility, detached, or at least detachable from, the structuring impact of tradition. Extreme fragmentation appears to be the order of the day: freedom from metanarratives may mean availability of the historian’s mind to reappropriate the signs tendered by the past in a manner that at least attempts to balance subjectivity and intersubjectivity; that is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario would consist in forcing these signs from the past into some kind of twentieth-century framework totally irrelevant to their bygone reality. Of course, we are speaking about the best-case scenario, to which we can apply Hillis Miller’s “ethics of reading,” an attitude granting texts the crucial

Invited paper, conference on “The Historical Understanding of Literature,” New York University, May 1995.

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moment of attention needed to see what they might possibly want to say for themselves. In turn this question, that of the status of the text, is a philosophical conundrum the way out of which is only marginally at stake here. Let us, by way of hypothesis, share with Gianni Vattimo the Heideggerian notion of the shattering of the poetic word. Yes, in postmodernity the poetic word is shattered, but in such a way as to let the work of truth begin in the subject, truth being the encounter with evidence that occurs when language in the everyday sense breaks up. If the critic, or in our case the historian, distances himself from the poetic self-referentiality that, in the framework of a philosophy of self-consciousness, would give the subject authentic freedom in the use of language, we can resort to the concept of monumentality, which gives poetry a different status, for a monument is not a function of subjective self-reference. It is primarily – perhaps even from the point of view of cultural anthropology – “a funerary monument built to bear the traces and the memory of someone across time, but for others” (Vattimo, 73). That is, the form endures, but the meaning is elusive, so that formal rules are neoclassical rather than classical – that is, have to be reinterpreted in a new context. We might envisage the literary historian as the poet of that shattered poetic word. The truth he or she is seeking is not a stable structure but an event, “a truth stripped of the authoritarian traits of metaphysical evidence.” Such are in my view both the risks and the opportunities of a renewed literary history. The historian is more alone than ever before to answer for, and justify, new constructions. But what are, more specifically, the risks and opportunities that beckon from the early modern field? One way to begin answering this question might be to wonder why we now tend to speak of an early modern age, alongside with or even in preference to the Renaissance designation? There are several reasons, and together they combine into a very good example of the challenge this age presents to the historian. First, the concept of Renaissance is linked to an opposition that stems from the age under study itself, whereby humanists would show the previous age as one in which the arts and letters and critical thought had been dead and could only be resurrected by retrieving the texts and wisdom of Greek and Roman civilization. Admittedly, what matters most are not labels but the actual characteristics of the age we are attempting to approach; yet (if only in recognition of the endless discussions about the relationship between res and verbum at that very time!) we have to accept that the Renaissance label has taken on a symbolical value that may impede rather than help the encounter that will give birth to historical truth: it oppresses and dissimulates, in retrospect, the previous centuries with the deceptively neutral label of

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“Middle” Ages, and even of “Dark Ages” for the previous era. Thus the name “Renaissance” privileges a phenomenon that at times (though at times not) was the ideal and the achievement of an intellectual elite, whereas, if we inventory the entire discourse of the period, we find (depending of course on the country and the exact time) that the philological endeavours to retrieve classical texts – for example, poetry or drama imitating those of classical antiquity – were only part of the picture, while deeply rooted national continuities were still massively present. The Renaissance idea was the hallmark of those who saw themselves as the heralds of the new age; when we use their terminology and criteria, we should do it knowingly. The “early modern” label, by contrast, imposes no intellectual or aesthetic hierarchy; it announces the dramatic discontinuity that will be the advent of the modern, while allowing a long breathing space for studying, inductively, phenomenon by phenomenon, the mode of its arrival. Another reason for favouring the early modern designation would be that the Renaissance concept evokes a model requiring a certain number of criteria to have been fulfilled within a country or a culture, such as the revival of ancient languages, which in turn stimulates the literary development of genres in the vernaculars, but also a confrontation and a reconciliation of values between the prevalent Christian vision and the rediscovered pagan philosophies; critical reappraisals, aided by philological devices, of scriptural and ecclesiastical traditions; courtly patronage of arts and letters, expansion of the sciences, of the geographical universe, of the cosmos; not to mention political developments such as the firming up of states, social developments such as the rise of the middle classes, and so on. These are only some of the criteria of what is sometimes described as a Renaissance; but one soon discovers that the model is most truly a model – that is, best embodied in Italy and in a few countries such as France, the Low Countries, later England or Poland – but that in other countries, say Germany or Bohemia, it is a much more scattered set of phenomena, occurring alongside or in conjunction or conflict with reformation or counterreformation movements. One can of course, in constructing Renaissance literary history, do what comparatists traditionally have done, which is to pursue, for the sake of comparability, easily recognizable, internationally present Renaissance trends and traits – let us say Petrarchism in Wyatt and Surrey and Du Bellay and Kochanowski and Rej and Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega and the Dalmatians, and identify, on the basis of all the aesthetic, ontological, and moral commonalities among these writers as they diversely follow Petrarch, a Europe-wide movement that, without

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a shadow of a doubt, has existed. But the social and spiritual awakening of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was far more complex, far richer, far more prolonged, far less continuous than the Renaissance constructs tend to show, despite their own inherent riches. The early modern designation also enables us to look at the entire social and cultural fabric of all the European nations in a given time-span, learning to observe their specificities and the dynamic of their respective cultures rather than to let our image of them be fashioned in terms of the levelling value-judgment implied in a classically based humanism’s triumphing over “les hommes obscurs.” Finally, the concept of early modernity allows for the study of any country or region in that time-span, not only those where Renaissance events in the stricter, Italian-based sense had taken place. Thus the renaming of the field expresses the preference of certain scholars for these less hierarchical perspectives rather than a desire to abolish the Renaissance name altogether, which would be tantamount to denying the triggering role of the Renaissance in Italy and of the humanist movement across the board. The early modern designation appears to invite specific limited, inductive historical studies that may (or may not) lead to more discoveries of difference and heterogeneity than of similarity and homogeneity. It does not invite negating the mass of previous studies, or announcing that the Renaissance was a mirage, but it encourages filling in the cracks, listening to individual and collective voices that were previously neglected, to the point where “rereadings” and “rewritings” of the Renaissance – expressions actually incorporated in titles of recent books – answer previously unanswered questions, questions unmistakably those of today’s scholars. For example, it becomes more problematic to postulate a linear progress of the concept of man when the conquest of selfhood is shown to be so much more difficult for women than for men, and when self-fashioning appears as a cultural rather than inward-directed phenomenon. These modified perspectives lead to modified topics of research and methods of approach. The authors of Rewriting the Renaissance have concentrated on the role of women and on the consequences of listening to their voices in shaping our picture of the epoch. The general import is reminiscent of a statement Jonathan Culler makes in his book On Deconstruction about the impact of feminist reading on the theory of reading and therefore ultimately of literature. The simple fact that collectively women may read and interpret a text differently from men leads at the very least to a diversification of theories. But this diversification implicitly grants entry to otherness in our questioning of the past, and this in my view has been happening in the Renaissance field. Feminist scholarship, writes Catharine Stimpson, “foregrounds

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‘phenomena’ that we have ignored, distorted or marginalized. Among them are patriarchy itself, the rule of the fathers; the marginalization of those whom the patriarchs would control; and the resistance of those on the margins.” During the Renaissance, for example, women in larger numbers “enter public culture, and wield the pen,” and “Elizabeth i was the most formidable ruler Europe knew” (vi). Thus, part of feminist scholarship has concentrated in unprecedented ways upon the lives and traditions and writings of women specifically. What has influenced the field even more is the rethinking of the relationship between the sexes and the stress on difference, not only of gender but of class, nationality, ethnicity, and the consequent search for discursive specificities that will ideologically affect modes of representation as well as aesthetic perception and expression within society. Such researches may interrelate with by now traditional Marxist and Freudian perspectives, delving into causes of alienation, or newer psychoanalytically literary perspectives such as the Lacanian, tending towards “poetics of fragmentation and indeterminacy” in authors whose rhetorical strategies, motivated by lack and desire, “create gaps, resistances to meaning in the text” (Frelick, 161). These are mere examples. The important point is our attention to the historical other, our learning to be historians through attention to that other, so starkly separated from us by a discouragingly unbridgeable temporal distance, even as that other faces its other in its own time. For these reasons I believe that the beneficiary of the rewriting and rethinking of the Renaissance that has been taking place is not only Renaissance scholarship but literary history and the theory of literary history in general. Rewriting the Renaissance is by no means a matter of simply adding new topics (let us say about the social status of women, or of writers, or problems in material civilization such as the famine in Lyons, or the history of time) but of revisiting the historical constitution of major Renaissance phenomena. Indeed, Ferguson, Quilligan, and Vickers begin by questioning Burckhardt’s pronouncement about the status of women who in certain milieux at least “stood on a footing of perfect equality with men.” This questioning engenders more questionings, for one, about the traditionally recognized progress towards the freedom and dignity of “man”: was it true of an elite only, or more generally? How would the answers vary from country to country, west to east, south to north? Or again, to what extent did the humanist program of education, despite its egalitarian claims, apply to men and women both? Leonardo Bruni bars women from the study of rhetoric; Montaigne ascribes to them the field of poetry and history but not that of

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philosophy. In this light, and taking into account the history of all people, including women, the question raised by the traditional Renaissance concept is whether it does not privilege the great artistic and literary achievements and achievers in its image of the whole civilization; the summits are undeniable, but our knowledge of the whole civilization should also extend to the valleys. “History,” say the authors of Rewriting the Renaissance: is more than the story of political, artistic and scientific achievements of great individuals. Only when we incorporate in our studies of Renaissance art and literature the findings of social historians who have begun to analyze new data about the lives of members of the lower as well as the upper strata of Renaissance society will we see how important the period is for students of modern society in general and for feminists in particular. What is at stake in a reevaluation of the Renaissance is the possibility of a fuller, more historically grounded understanding of the socioeconomic system under which we now live, as well as a better appreciation of differences: not only those that distinguish late twentieth century Western societies from those of Renaissance Europe, but also those of class and gender that exist within the societies commonly designated by the term Renaissance.” (Ferguson et al., xvii)

For the literary and/or cultural historian, what difference would this make to research? It does not change the literary historians’ responsibility with respect to the study of forms and their transformations, but it adds to their responsibility – and this of course applies to any period – to endeavour to know the realities to which these changes in form were responding, if only to preclude hasty and naïve conclusions. As an example we could cite the frequent use of the dialogue form inherited from classical antiquity by way, principally, of Plato, Cicero, and Lucian of Samosata. It is legitimate to ask whether the massive adoption of the dialogue among the doxographic forms of discourse (treatises, pamphlets, letters, commentaries, and so on) meant a general readiness to consider alternative views in philosophical, political, theological discussion. But already the three classical models differ among themselves over the fairness of the inquiry. Plato, with or without Socrates as intermediary, will bring the conclusion into line with his philosophical vision, having used the opponents to dramatize the inquiry. True, in the case of Cicero, “in utramque partem disserere” – that is, looking at both sides of a philosophical dilemma is possible, though the conclusion may lean to one side of the inquiry. Lucian’s use of the dialogue is both theatrical and satirical, powerfully ridiculing the opposition. For Renaissance scholars the question therefore arises whether, in philosophical speculation regarding, for

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example, man’s ability to reach the truth, there occur any significant progressions towards independence from theological answers. Many studies concur in showing that the Renaissance dialogue has often served as a rhetorical device communicating, though subtly and pleasantly through clever uses of mimesis, predetermined truths. It is important, however, to remember that in the course of the dialogue divergent views have been aired – for example, Moslem and Hebrew doctrines in Nicolas of Cusa’s De pace fidei (1453) or Jean Bodin’s Heptaplomeres (1598). Here the literary historian, who may be searching for signs of openness towards the Other and tolerance, is called upon to probe, through the rhetorical strategies in the text, the paths that were open to the Renaissance reader’s imagination for picturing the point of view of the Other but to do so without letting that expectation lead to excessive confidence in a climate of tolerance. Thus, the literary or cultural historian’s task begins with selfcritically analysing his or her mode of questioning to ensure that this aspect of the history of the Renaissance dialogue is not being used in the service of a given model only, for instance, to confirm or contradict a given periodization, in this case to deny a degree of epistemological independence that would appear to be in conflict with Foucault’s “univers de la ressemblance” or with the more general, widespread notion that the pre-Cartesian mentality excludes independence of judgment. Rather, the historian should let the dialogue corpus modify the questioning in such a way that it will either lead, on the basis of all available evidence, to a genuine discovery concerning the potential meaning of the hardy persistence of the dialogue form, or force the discarding of the question itself in favour of one that will provide a better bridge between the historian’s questioning and the world of signs at his disposal. For example, it is not unthinkable that in texts such as the Cortegiano or the Heptaméron the early modern mentality of the participants enjoys the spirit of lively conversation, exchange, gamesmanship, without assuming the deep epistemological responsibility of providing the ultimate metaphor for the truth-seeking process. I have used this case to exemplify – and to apply to the Renaissance period – the historians’ dialogue with dialogue as they come to grips with the interaction of past and present recently discussed by Linda Hutcheon and Mario Valdés: Fernand Braudel called his own historical work comparative, not only because it crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries, but because it involved what he called the “dialectic of past and present.” Similarly, literary history is inevitably history of the past as read through the present. It cannot be simply

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a cumulative record of all that has been written or performed or even a compilation of themes and forms. The literary past, that is, the past of both literature’s production and its reception, is unavoidably interpreted in the light of the present, and present knowledge of it will therefore be partial and provisional. (4)

It will be conditioned by the situation of each historian in a linguistic and cultural community; from there it will face and interpret the texts of the past. In my earlier work I have acknowledged a number of times the status of comparative literary histories as contemporary discourse and the consequent degree of selection and construction that enters the writing of literary history, as well as, increasingly, the risk of universalizing upon premises that are intersubjectively valid within a specific culture. I have also emphasized the opportunity for the literary historian to structure his narrative metaphorically according to models provided by Northrop Frye, Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White. But a careful distinction must be made between the final narrative and the process of acquiring and selecting the materials upon which it will be based. With respect to the final narrative, the historian is called upon to redescribe elements of the past and, in doing so, to make the texts of the past – and the past as text – live through imagination. But this process of narrativization must be preceded by concrete inductive research, the results of which should always take precedence over abstract systematizing and, whenever necessary, modify the descriptive system itself. The work of the international group that has been elaborating the Renaissance sub-series of the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is congruent with the “rewriting the Renaissance” trend in several ways. Its program, both in the published volume (L’Avènement de l’esprit nouveau: 1400–80) and in the three further volumes in preparation (which together cover the years 1480–1610) encompasses the elite production inspired by humanism as well as more popular writings: for example, it recognizes in fifteenth-century historiography a learned trend as well as an apologetic one that glorifies national heroes and traditions. It delves into fictional genres but also doxographic ones, thus contributing to the widening of the concept of literature. It follows the progression of the Italian model through the literatures of Europe without neglecting their endogenous development. It attempts to situate itself at the interface of text and context, recognizing how much literature is rooted in collective life and culture, while it remains attentive to literature as a specific, self-reflexive phenomenon acting upon that life and culture. It endeavours to make more audible the

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“silent voices” of women and of a variety of religious heterodoxies. In short, it attempts to embody the dual success implied in the following quotation concerning Renaissance studies: The cumulative effect of this outpouring of attention on the Renaissance has been twofold – to cause the works of canonical authors such as Shakespeare to be read in radically new ways and to awaken interest in heretofore neglected writers and sources. In addition, because new historicism has absorbed, while moving beyond experience, the lessons of deconstruction concerning the textual structure of experience, it has called into question the traditional distinction between literary “foreground” and historical ‘background’. For just as works of art are implicated in the power relations of a society, so power relations are in large measure articulated and contested through symbolic representations. (Rudnytsky, 12)

The rethinking of well-known texts, discovery of new ones, and bringing to light of multiple relationships between text and society are objectives very compatible with the Comparative History of Literatures Renaissance project. But there is also another way in which it develops a discourse of and for our time concerning the Renaissance: by presenting a collective response to the call of the distant voices from the early modern past, one that seeks no other unity than that of questioning but hopes for consistency, in order to offer readers a stimulating but undogmatic instrument of inquiry, challenging them to enter into a dialogue of their own with the distant voices of the Renaissance.

works cited Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1982. Ferguson, Margaret W., Maureen Quilligan, Nancy J. Vickers, eds. Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago University Press 1986. Frelick, Nancy. Conclusion to Délie as Other: Toward a Poetics of Desire in Scève’s Délie. Lexington: French Forum 1994. 161–2. Horowitz, Maryanne Cline, Anne J. Cruz, and Wendy A. Furman. Renaissance Rereadings: Intertext and Context. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1988. Klaniczay, Tibor, Eva Kushner, and André Stegmann, eds. L’Avènement de l’esprit nouveau (1400–1480). Renaissance vol. 1 of Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó 1988.

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Kushner, Eva. “Thoughts upon Renaissance Literary Historiography.” Sensus communis, Festschrift für Henry Remak. Tübingen: Gunther Narr Verlag 1986. 139–44. – “Déconstruction et reconstruction de l’histoire littéraire.” In L’Histoire littéraire, Théories, méthodes pratiques, ed. Clément Moisan. Québec: Presses de l’université Laval 1989. 227–39. – “Articulation historique de la littérature.” In Théorie littéraire: problèmes et perspectives, ed. Marc Angenot, Jean Bessière, Douwe Fokkema, and Eva Kushner. Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1989. 103–25. – “From Time Lost to Time Regained: Thoughts on Literary History.” In Aesthetics and the Literature of Ideas, ed. François Jost. Newark: University of Delaware Press 1990. 66–75. Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Paul de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James and Benjamin. New York: Columbia University Press 1987. Stimpson, Catharine R. Series Editor’s Foreword to Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986. Rudnytsky, Peter L. Introduction to Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1991. Valdés, Mario, and Linda Hutcheon. “Rethinking Literary History – Comparatively.” acls Occasional Paper no. 27, American Council of Learned Societies, 1994. Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Trans. Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1988.

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15 History and the Absent Self

Despite the fact that collective identities (whether in terms of gender or culture or ethnicity) claim to exist, and to have the right to exist for the sake of the development of the individual self, that claim is often little more than window-dressing. Yet what can one hope to accomplish by showing that the subject of the subject has received insufficient attention or the wrong kind of attention? Even if it were only clarification, it would be time well spent. But humanists have more at stake in this questioning than just clear categories because it matters supremely – without any play whatsoever on the word humanitas – who or what is the ultimate focus of this branch of knowledge. Self, subject, individual, person, personality, the I (whether or not divided in to ego, superego, and id) all have philosophical connotations; all have been more or less under suspicion of harbouring overtones of traditional and/or systematic concepts of man within the universe, with or without the image of God factored in. Far from being a sign of failure, decentrement today seems to be for the humanist a sign of awareness, if not of success. The problem is thus displaced, but does not disappear. Epistemological and philosophical caution has not killed the question: who speaks? to whom? and how do they reach each other? The immensely rich spectrum of the human

Guest lecture, Humanities Institute, Simon Fraser University, Mar. 1993. Published in Celebrating Comparativism, Essays in honour of G.M. Vajda and I. Fried, ed. K. Kürtösi and J. Pál (Szeged 1994), 27–37.

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sciences has multiplied perspectives on the self, creating the need for interdiscursive and interdisciplinary approaches. That the subject is elusive and the search among the loops of the network never-ending is, I think, a given. Sartre and others have shown how pre-defining the human being results in an objectification that in turn may endanger the liberty of the self. (But all the while he alludes in general terms to the inalienable individuality of the existent; even in his case the commonalities are more evident than the uniqueness of each being, not to mention the fact that the core of that uniqueness is itself in question.) What we seldom see addressed is what should be, and implicitly either is or is not the bottom line: the need to recognize philosophically, not apart from but within the recognition of universality as an absolute, the individuality of the individual as a legitimate field of knowledge. There is a challenging statement – challenging by its logic – that goes as follows (you can almost tell its date by its non-inclusive language): “Every man is in certain respects: a. like all other men; b. like some other man; c. like no other men.” This is taken from a 1953 textbook entitled Personality in Nature and Culture. The explanation given by the authors for this sweeping statement seems quaint today because at least two of the three categories they invoke would be contested: “The portion of personality ‘like all other men’ refers to human nature,” but human nature is not a universally admitted philosophical concept. ‹Like some other men’ designates national character,” but who is prepared to accept the concept of national character as a reliable criterion of personality? ‹Like no other men’ is the horizon of one’s individuality” (53). The challenge we know so well in literary studies comes from the tension between, on the one hand, a search for laws that are universally valid for discourse in general, and, on the other, laws that would accurately express the particular, indeed the unique characteristics of the individual works of art in which the individual person expresses himself or herself aesthetically. Admittedly, our disciplines deal with knowledge of the individual and not with the unmediated immediacy of the individual life. The current unease with all mediations of individual experience stems from a variety of doubts converging in diffidence towards the ability of the discourse of knowledge (authorized, entitled, qualified) to express that experience in a valid way. It is as if some kind of breakthrough were expected to solve an age-old paradox: epistemologically the subject is the most difficult category to conceptualize because it must conceptualize itself. For anthropology the self is at any rate a social construct. “The self,” says one anthropologist, “as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience. After a self has arisen, it in a certain sense provides for itself its social experiences,

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and so we can conceive of an absolutely solitary self” (George H. Mead, quoted in Krysinski, 237, my translation). In other words, the solitary self only exists as such because social experience has motivated it to perceive itself and be perceived as such. But other thinkers working in other disciplines do not accept this essential subordination of the experience or idea of self to society. Let me also anticipate my next point by saying that even if it were impossible to disprove or effectively to oppose this anthropological concept, the problematic of the subject would return, as it does, in some other fashion, because of the stubborn experience of individual uniqueness. “I am I because I know myself not to be you” is one way of putting it. Or, at a less instinctive and more discursive level of experience, “We disagree; therefore I am.” But we can also call on other disciplines than anthropology, and the perspectives of their thinkers, to show some of the ways in which the reality of the subject is being addressed. Such might be research into the neonatal psyche, attempting to determine to what extent it is really tabula rasa and to what extent primary emotions such as anger impel it to reach out to the presence of others. Some of the earlier work of Julia Kristeva has gone in that direction, and there is work in Canada (such as that of Professor Marike Finlay of McGill University) that specifically and boldly links neonatal research with the problematic of the subject by showing its relationship with the anteriority of the individual’s inwardness. Finlay’s research is of an empirical nature and may as such not be fully acceptable to philosophers. But there are, in Canada and abroad, a wealth of other indications that the reality of the individual, or let me call it the reality within the individual, is receiving attention in various disciplines. Let us consider a few examples. In France a volume entitled Penser le sujet aujourd’hui incorporates one of the interdisciplinary colloquia of Cerisy-la-Salle. The common purpose of the authors was to put into question the shared conception of the human being as object of conditionings and determinations, and to explore the human being as author of its actions and works, that is, as subject, starting with cognitive and ethical subjectivity. The idea is not to resurrect that which has long been under suspicion – the concept of an autonomous, absolutely defined being whose situation vis-à-vis other human beings, as well as the universe and in some philosophies God, can be rationally described. Rather, what brings back the problematic of the subject is a nostalgia for that kind of certainty, which can never return, so that it is the very problematicity of the concept that demands to be accepted and treated as such. This is not a rearguard battle to reconquer the reassuring ambience of a philosophy that knew that it knew what it knew: the most elusive of all objects, the

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thinker’s own self. It is indeed a postmodern exercise that uncertainty for granted but for that very reason restarts the thinking process about the whole in terms of what is closest, most familiar, most concrete: the particular case of the individual self. Why is such a new start thought to be necessary? Because the combined impact of the human sciences in the twentieth century has tended to suppress subjectivity. Modernity had been allied generally with a positive status for the human self as independent or at least specific locus of thought, cognition, emotion; this foundational concept has been, however, constantly put into question by the very thinkers and movements that declared the greatest interest in the well-being of the human person. Depth psychology organizes the self into a number of structures, conscious or unconscious, over which the individual has little or no control. Marxism subjects it to social, economic, historical, and at any rate collective forces, leaving little or no leeway for individual responsibility. Even linguistics, which provided the earliest models for structuralism, contributes to disarticulate the individual into structures. “Der Mensch spricht nicht, die Sprache spricht durch den Mensch,” said Heidegger, and linguistics followed suit with its systems of signs that exercise constraints upon individual meanings and claim priority upon the process of thought itself. These are some of the dimensions of what has been dubbed “the death of the subject.” A turn towards the other direction, which would be renewed attention to the subject, would not be fruitful if it were just a return of the pendulum, an individualistic backlash against collective pressures or an unanalysed acceptance of traditional humanistic values. I am not refusing the re-entry or preservation of traditional humanistic values, only granting them validity if demonstrated and analysed so that they do not use the vehicle of any new subjectivism to hide various ideologies that could still be, under a number of guises and disguises, opium for the people, so to say. Nor am I claiming that the concepts of subject and individual coincide totally, or that the term subject is univocal. I am saying that “subject” is not necessarily a rallying cry for the defence of the individual person in his or her difference, although reflection upon the history and nature of the concept will almost certainly yield insights favourable to the understanding and revaluing of individuality. It has been said that, etymologically, subjectus and subjicere pointed more to submission and being the object of an activity than to autonomy. In the history of philosophy the concept has changed meanings, has become more complex, and has now become through its very evolution and openness a potential focus for fruitful discussion and research. Basically, there has been a usage, particularly

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in the epistemological sphere, in which the subject is not individualized or individuated because in, let us say, the potential understanding of mathematical principles, subjects are equivalent and the knowledge would be regarded as intersubjective; and another usage referring to the irreducible individuality dwelling in the subject. “The two positions,” says one author, are irreconcilable. One affirms the identity of minds, the other their irreducible differences. But they also have different functions: one is the subject of knowledge deployed in mathesis universalis, the other is the same subject in terms of capacities other than knowledge: speaking, experiencing passions. And it is probably not by chance that the texts which are most explicit with respect to the first functions are scientific texts […] whereas the second can be ascertained in texts dealing with ethics, or passions. (de Buzon, 21, my trans.)

Obviously, it would be foolish to attempt even the most succinct typology of the variations of these two conceptions of the subject: what is crucial for us, however, is their very divergence and the manner in which repersonalizing the subject can often slide into another form of depersonalization and the thinkers in appearance most likely to depersonalize the subject turn out to allow it to be itself to a surprising extent. In a general way the authors of Penser le sujet aujourd’hui show how from Descartes’ cogito there can flow both types of conceptions. All positivisms (starting with that of Comte) see the subject as a substratum, a knowing and active subject but one that acts as “norm for singular consciousnesses” and therefore suppresses their individuality (de Buzon, 24, my trans.). Gaston Bachelard, in his role as analyst of the scientific mind, was exemplary here: “In the course of the objectivizing scientific process, which tends to eliminate singularities, the subject objectivizes itself” (quoted in de Buzon, 24, my trans.). Individuality is but accidental; science sets it straight, so to say. Error alone would be personal, while the subject becomes itself through objectivity alone. If we now recall Bachelard’s critical theory, with its categories of images that create networks of affinities among poems written by very different poets, so that the poetic reality stems far more from the collective imagination than from the emotional investment of the singular poet, we realize that a similar concept of the subject underlies both Bachelard’s philosophy of science and his poetics, an intersubjective concept in which the role of the imaginary structures and their linkages with the rest of the literary system are more fundamental than the psyche that gave birth to the poem. If we also recall that Bachelard was the grandfather of

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Nouvelle critique in France and Switzerland, we are touching one of the sources and in a way the source of the demise of the individual author in the critical theory of the fifties. Many globalizing systems of literary theory were generated since then; Krysinski considers that Northrop Frye’s was the last of such systems. “The last of the global literary theories, the Anatomy of Criticism of Northrop Frye, dissects the body of the work or, more exactly, the allotropy” (or let us say the centrifugal nature) of literature (236). Literature is one, but articulates itself in various bodies and organisms: The anatomistic critic is not interested in the physiology of the literary work of art. He lists the creators, poets, novelists or short-story writers, and the various configurations within the literary work. Implicitly, the creator or author is a subject that will shape the work. None of these (globalizing) movements or critics is interested in the subjective foundations of the work. The subjectivity of the work, that would travel through the author-subject and would be concretized in the work is not envisioned by them. (236)

I would say that the polysystem theory goes much further, since it views literary works as materials entering from outside a system that assimilates, transforms, or rejects them in a mechanistic way in which even the intersubjectivity implicit in Frye’s thought is superseded. Obviously, other philosophical and theoretical tendencies have followed the obverse route, that of attributing anteriority, indeed priority to the individual subject within the community of subjects; such would be phenomenology. Husserl’s concept of an intentional consciousness has its roots in Leibnitz’s monadology. Husserl believes that “the community of selves, insofar as it constitutes the world, always precedes the constituted world” (quoted in de Buzon, 27, my trans.). Hermeneutic theories and practices extend this subjective priority to the relationship between the author’s meaning and the reader’s response. Once again, however, I am struck by the fact that the subject undergoes a series of transformations that may – or may not – result in its reduction to the substratum status that was one of the two paths opened by Descartes’s cogito. In another corner of the panoply of theoretical thought we might take Bakhtin’s as one of the major endeavours to accommodate, without treason and without reduction, the subjective within the social. Yet the discourse of the subject is socially determined in its dialogicity. In the common space the self becomes a sign, and the dialogue of consciousnesses requires that common space, apart from which subjectivity cannot encounter the subjectivity of others. Theoretically Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony is designed to give a voice to the other (as subject) within the novel, and therefore to social dialogue, be-

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cause the truly other is given a voice. But can we go along with Bakhtin’s optimism, which envisages a kind of reconciliation of inner worlds in dialogue? When commenting on Dostoevsky’s underground man, Bakhtin sees him concerned mostly with what others think of him, trying to anticipate every reaction of others towards him. But is that really the role of the polyphonic hero? Krysinski sees that role as far more polemical and agonistic than does Bakhtin. The underground hero (or if you will anti-hero) cries out his disagreement, his discomfort with the world; he communicates “his disenchantment and disagreement, his phantasms and obsessions, and finally his discourse inscribed in a metadialogical relation with the world. He is the subjective communication of a world vision addressed to all and to no one, to the Other and to the underground consciousness itself” (Krysinski, 244). I therefore see that kind of hero as a model for the representation of the often protesting and even rebellious attitude of the subject in the world, monological if need be and so dissonant with Bakhtin’s thought. Narratologists, poeticians, linguists, and semioticians have indeed responded to the need to account for the singular discourse of the individual by, for example, incorporating passions (what would Descartes say to this?) into the discursive typology, and in general by arranging for a typology of systems of signs that attempts to take into account all the potential philosophical stances regarding the self, including those that greatly upset existing conventions in both philosophy and literature. The opportunity that lies before us here is that of problematizing and aestheticizing the quest for identity, for inwardness, for relating to others. What I have said so far explains why a Renaissance scholar would enter this particular fray. As we have increasingly been realizing, our historical rethinking, rewriting, rereading of the early modern period is avowedly a historical discourse of our time and translates our own concerns into our construction of the early modern age. With respect to the individuation of the human subject, this might take the form of a reaction against some of Michel Foucault’s assumptions about the Renaissance, particularly when he portrays the Renaissance thinker and writer as engaged in an absolutely static world of similitude in which signs refer to other signs which refer to a fixed and predetermined vision of the universe. In that sense the rediscovery of classical antiquity made no difference because, according to Foucault, both Scripture and ancient Greek and Latin literature refer to that known universe that also speaks to man in nature, with the result that the epistemic situation of the early modern self is quite uncreative: Dans le trésor que nous a transmis l’Antiquité, le langage vaut comme le signe des choses. Il n’y a pas de différence entre ces marques visibles que Dieu a

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déposées sur la surface de la terre, pour nous en faire connaître les secrets intérieurs, et les mots lisibles que l’Écriture, ou les sages de l’Antiquité, qui ont été éclairés par une divine lumière, ont déposé en ces livres que la tradition a sauvés. Le rapport aux textes est de même nature que le rapport aux choses; ici et là, ce sont des signes qu’on relève. (48)

Further on, he adds: La vérité de toutes ces marques – qu’elles traversent la nature, ou qu’elles s’alignent sur les parchemins ou dans les bibliothèques – est partout la même: aussi archaïque que l’institution de Dieu … Il n’y a partout qu’un même jeu, celui du signe et du similaire, et c’est pourquoi la nature et le verbe peuvent s’entrecroiser à l’infini, formant pour qui sait lire comme un grand texte unique. (49)

In studying early modern authors I have (as others have) been attempting to assess whether this world of sameness to which the individual self could only adhere, and had no mental means of expanding or changing or stirring up in any way, fairly represents at least certain well-known and particularly assertive early modern selves. I am haunted by the case of Jan Hus, writing letters from the Franciscan prison cell in Constance where he was awaiting death in the summer of 1415. (But one might also think of Thomas More, more than a century later, in similar circumstances.) In the following excerpt from the letter of 27 June 1415 let us note the assumption of personal responsibility for the interpretation of Scripture that Hus had been offering throughout his teaching and preaching: “You should also know,” he writes to the members of the University of Prague, “that I have neither revoked nor abjured a single article. The Council desired that I declare that all and every article drawn from my books is false. I refused unless they should show its falsity by Scripture” (198). Of course, Hus assumes that the meaning of scriptural passages is there to be understood; it is not of his making. But he sees himself as having the inner resources to interpret them according to God’s will against the interpretations of others, even those who have power to kill him, as they will the next day. “I said that I detest whatever false sense exists in any of the articles, and commit it to the correction of the Lord Jesus Christ, who knows my sincere intention and does not interpret it in a wrong sense which I do not intend. I exhort you also in the Lord that whatever false sense you may be able to discern in those articles, that you relinquish them, but always preserve the truth that is intended” (198–9). It is that tension between Foucault’s description and some of the textual signs of very resistant and persistent selfhoods that challenges

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us. Of course, everything in this history is not black and white. We are dealing with textual signs imprinted by cruelly existential situations of long ago with no other evidence regarding the personalities involved than those very textual signs. Foucault himself, when it comes to the subject of madness, opposes the kind of historiography that eradicates whole categories of individual selves from the memory of mankind, and implicitly invites us to seek their forgotten voices in the margins of history. This is essentially what many historians of today are doing, as part of the enterprise of reintegrating the subject into history. Philosophies of history such as Hegel’s, which among their vast configurations eradicate entire epochs and continents, now belong to the archaeology of the discipline. Schools of history such as the Ecole des Annales and histoire des mentalités are concentrating on what used to be considered too minute to be part of macrohistorical constructions. By the same token, however, the material and quantitative or qualitative methods that are theirs again speak to the collective, or at least the general experience. In summary, the subject remains present in them in three ways: 1. The historian himself is a subject, in that it is recognized that history-writing is the construction of a mind steeped in its own historicity, making its own choices, imprinting its own vision upon the transmittal of the past. Rather than speaking of reconstruction or re-enactment in Collingwood’s sense (which, however, harboured a subjective aspect), we speak of constructing history, thus admitting the creative role of the individual mind but by the same token admitting that history is the discourse of a person in a time-frame shared with others. 2. In postmodernity history is not autonomous; genres collapse into one another so that, for example, in historical fiction the past may become instrumental to the author’s subjective intention rather than the fiction’s simply adding enargeia to the historical account. 3. The reader of history enters into the fray; the gaps in the story are left to the workings of his or her imagination. My questioning concerns what I consider an implicit suppression of the very purpose to which much political, social, and cultural thought and action is directed. Take, for example, what has happened to the concept of development in recent years. It used to be oriented towards maximizing the resources of Third world countries so that local resources would be fully utilized, that social structures, customs, skills, and forms of economic organization would be enhanced and gradually brought in line with compatible modern forms of production. Respect of human personalities and of their development to their full

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potential through a process of education was certainly part of the agenda. What has tended to occur is that development today is a strictly economic construct, the domain of global financial institutions and major economic world powers. The goal is to radically restructure national economies within global and financial commodity markets. The internal social and economic stability which is a precondition implicit in this goal is often achieved by […] suppression of organized popular dissent and alternative platforms of national development. (Inter Pares, 1)

This process of development is of course the obverse of what development had set out or at least pretended to set out to achieve: “It subordinates citizens to the nation, the nation to the international marketplace, and the economic needs of people to the economic imperative of national and global economies.” I take these excerpts from the bulletin of one of the many relief agencies that attempt to salvage and build up the humane purpose of development. The alternative process of development proposed by this agency emphasizes quite a different set of values, favourable to people and communities: “An historical and cultural process in which people act together, learn together, make political and economic choices together, and create the world for themselves. The development process is a permanent, ongoing process of cultural invention, and of directed and dynamic social change.” It is obvious that the alternative process is designed with a view, as the author says, to “people” and therefore to the fulfilment of the individual personality in a more merciful environment. Note, however, that it is collective and, by the author’s own admission, directed; while the results of such enterprises often demonstrate the authenticity of their human concern for the physical and psychological welfare of the individual, the process is collective and addresses the environment rather than the person. In a book entitled The Critical Path (1971) Northrop Frye portrayed the dialectical relationship between the imaginative adventures of the human mind (that is, myths in the literary sense) and what he called the myth of concern, which I take to mean the call of the human conscience to redeem the world. But as in Bakhtin, so in Frye, the concern does not descend to the fate of the individual psyche, only taking for granted that the psyche will find its vocation and its fulfilment in a thriving culture. I am not on an individualistic crusade, if only because an endless pursuit of the knowledge of the self may end up in some kind of paralysing solipsism. I should prefer to interpose between or in addition to Frye’s two types of mythos a third element to house the search of the individual

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psyche for its place in culture and in the universe such that it be viewed as the end, and culture as the means. Rather than legitimizing further a variety of splinter studies in which groupings by gender, culture, and ethnicity clamour for a place in the sun on the grounds of their difference, and a variety of historical, literary, and artistic forms that institute the self as a dominant theme, this approach would remotivate more people to believe that they have a stake in culture. It would go some way towards healing the schizophrenic split between the private and the public self, towards showing the search for self-identity to be a harmonious though independent part of the search for cultural identity. It would make alterity less distant and frightening, because the presence of the other in the self would make self-analysis increasingly dialogical. Many possess these insights without ever realizing that they might in some way be connected with what we call research in the humanities. That in turn is a reason why I feel that some members of the humanities research community might sometimes spend part of their time on some applied empirical research involving the problem of the self, as when colleagues working in medical ethics study the problem of the competence of the very old person who is often declared incompetent and left in hospital to become totally senile because there has been insufficient assessment: what a perfect example of – how many? – selves thoughtlessly obliterated from history.

works cited de Buzon, Fréderic. “L’individu et le sujet.” In Penser le sujet aujourd’hui, ed. E. Guibert-Sledziewski and J.-L. Viellard-Baron. Paris: Méridien-Klincksieck 1988. 17–30. Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les Choses. Paris: Gallimard 1966. Frye, Northrop. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1971. Hus, Jan. The Letters of John Hus. Trans. Matthew Spinka. Manchester: Manchester University Press 1972. Inter Pares. Bulletin 15, no. 2 (1993). Kluckhohn, Clyde, and Murray, Henry A. Personality in Nature, Society and Culture. New York: Alfred Knopf 1953. Krysinski, Wladimir. “Subjectum comparationis: les incidences du sujet dans le discours.” In Théorie littéraire: problèmes et perspectives, ed. M. Angenot, J. Bessière, D. Fokkema, E. Kushner. Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1989. 235–48.

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16 The Emergence of the Paradoxical Self

Few actions, few pronouncements are as symbolical of their age as Luther’s, confronting the Diet of Worms. In attempting to understand – perhaps merely in concrete and individual terms at the outset – the situation of the early modern self, it is helpful to reflect upon the mental and emotional tension experienced by Luther as he faced that august, severe assembly and uttered his famous words of resistance. Often, one reads abridged versions of his statement. Let us consider it in its entirety: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope nor in councils alone), since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves, I am bound by the scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me, Amen. (112–13)

Different historians have had different reasons to interpret Luther’s words according to their respective visions of the collective event. My purpose at the outset is to capture a glimpse of the barest elements of

Invited paper, North West Pacific Renaissance Conference, Vancouver, Mar. 1993. Chapter in Imagining Culture: Essays in Early Modern History and Literature, ed. Jonathan Hart (New York: Garland 1996), 41–55.

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the situation: in appearance at least a strong, resistant, persistent, and highly motivated individual is consciously defying a powerful and threatening authority. The phenomenon is not new in the sixteenth century: from the earliest Christian martyrs whom faith lifted above their unarmed selves, endowing them with extraordinary courage, sacrificial resistance against authority on spiritual grounds had occurred in contexts as divergent as those of Joan of Arc and Jan Hus. With these predecessors and countless others Luther had in common the conviction that the God whom they served gave them the necessary strength to do so. In Luther’s case there appears to have been, along with that sense of a sustenance transcending the individual human self, another source of strength, an inner certainty of a cognitive nature, a self-aware inwardness. This working hypothesis is not an easy one to uphold following all the postmodern and poststructuralist questionings of the premodern self, so intent upon identifying the advent of subjectivity with that of modernity, and the advent of modernity with a defined aspect of Cartesianism. Why attempt such a hypothesis at all? Current historiographical trends do not forbid or preclude concentration upon the history of the self; it is simply not relevant to them. It also gets into the way of comfortable, commonly accepted periodizations. Yet, without challenging either the concept or the timing of the advent of modernity, history might greatly benefit from exploring more thoroughly than has been the case the phenomena, and the time-spans, of the emergence of the subject as source of knowledge and as moral origin; not for the sake of displacing chronological frontiers once again but for that of allowing specificities to manifest themselves, with their very contradictions – as illustrated, for example, by the persistence of theological attachments in the minds of such agents of the scientific revolution as Copernicus or Kepler. Emergence is after all part and parcel of phenomena, and exploring it cannot but enhance the knowledge of the phenomena themselves. Before the current wave of rereadings, rethinkings, rewritings of the Renaissance there appeared to be a common understanding of the major changes the Renaissance brought about in the concept of the human person. Without denying the existence of strong personalities in the Middle Ages, historians such as Delumeau would depict the “épanouissement” of the individual, foreshadowing, as he puts it, the appearance of modern humanity. Delumeau does not envisage a high degree of personal independence as yet. Artists depend on patrons; humanists are linked to the ruling classes; reformers, though rebellious, are carried and “chained down” by popular movements. Despite their impressive argumentation, in the end Joan of Arc and Jan Hus perish by fire.

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Copernicus’s treatise is printed only shortly before his death, which means that in his case the problem of challenging authority did not arise in any extreme form. In this connection I do not completely agree with Delumeau’s image of the rebels, precisely to the extent that, despite the collective forces that constrained them, the public role they played would have been impossible without exceptional inner resources. In the main, according to Delumeau, the individual is coming into his own inasmuch as social hierarchies begin to be viewed more critically. Nobility, from Petrarch on, can be based on merit. Everywhere in Europe the middle class is generating exceptional individuals such as the prototypical Jacques Coeur. Luther asserts that, subject to God’s will, no one can defeat him as long as he is alive. Greatness of form, whether in art or in ceremonies, celebrates those who create and those who sponsor. Fame is thought to extend present greatness into immortality. Education moulds and impels the individual person on the path to excellence. Self-fashioning, a personal preoccupation, also serves the state. This wave of self-confidence is counterbalanced by experiences of melancholy, acedia, unrequited love, fear of death, consciousness of sin. At this point we might be tempted to ask: how could there be any doubt that both sets of experiences, the happy as well as the unhappy ones, led individuals to examine at least the degree of their control over their innermost lives – if only to dare to contradict the still prevalent astrological beliefs? Yet the insights provided by Delumeau into the development of the Renaissance person are rich but merely contextual. They indicate favourable conditions for the emergence of self-motivated individualities against many odds and for the continuous development of such conditions. They do not prove self-aware inwardness, only improved chances for it. But inwardness itself has been considered by historians to be distinct from what was to become modern subjectivity. For St Augustine and St Anselm of Canterbury the language of inwardness underlies the exploration of self, the imperfections of which serve to grasp the perfection of God. Charles Taylor describes the impact of that Augustinian intuition, which was to have such a lasting impact on subsequent thought: My experience of my own thinking puts me in contact with a perfection, which at one and the same time shows itself to be an essential condition of that thinking and also far beyond my finite scope and powers to attain … The notion that the idea must occur is the properly “Augustinian” intuition: we can only understand ourselves if we see ourselves as in contact with a perfection which

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is beyond us … The Augustinian proof moves through the subject and through the undeniable foundations of his presence to himself. (140–1)

But this Augustinian conquest still only represents the generality of human selves, of their intersubjective potential, each and all, to become the ground of the knowledge of God. Taylor argues that it will be a long time, and decidedly past the early modern period, before the question of the identity of the self is fully posed. In his view, Montaigne sets out on that path without reaching the goal: “Montaigne is an originator of the search for each person’s originality,” a quest not just different but “in a sense antithetical” to that of Descartes: “Each turns us in a sense inward and tries to bring some order in the soul; but this likeness is what makes the conflict between them particularly acute” (182). Descartes will call “for a radical disengagement from ordinary experience; Montaigne requires a deeper engagement in our particularity. These two aspects of modern individuality have been at odds up to this day” (182). Taylor then shows that Montaigne brought the expression of human feeling to an unprecedented degree of intensity through his process of self-examination mediated by the written word: “The search for self in order to come to terms with oneself, which Montaigne inaugurates, has become one of the fundamental themes of our modern culture” (183). The absolute perfection that consists in loyally enjoying one’s own being, to use Montaigne’s own words in iii:13, is an insight that still resonates in us and still encourages reflexivity. Despite all this, according to Taylor, Montaigne finally fails to attain a truly modern sense of selfhood. Why? “There is a question about ourselves – which we roughly gesture at with the term ‘identity’ – which cannot be sufficiently answered with any general doctrine of human nature” (183). We might reply to Taylor that Montaigne did not aim at formulating a general doctrine of human nature that would supersede the philosophies he was reading and to which he was responding. For Taylor the search for identity is the search “for what I essentially am”; it cannot be defined in universal terms about human agency in general; there is a residual and haunting question “about me, and that is why I think of myself as a self” (183). Did Montaigne reach a concept of that inalienable centre that is I and no other? From my perspective he did not do so in monadological, rationalistic terms – which he would at any rate reject by dint of epistemological doubt – but that does not mean he did not at least problematize it. Rather than directly answer the question he raised about Montaigne, Taylor points to the danger of anachronism. We cannot credit

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Montaigne with fully conceiving selfhood because “the full modern question of identity belongs to the post-Romantic period” (184). Surely, periodization cannot be used as the decisive proof of the existence or non-existence of a phenomenon at a given time in history? Taylor finally grants Montaigne a very special place, an alternative one that does take into account the emergent status of Montaigne’s concept of self: “Montaigne served as a paradigm figure to illustrate another way in which Augustinian inwardness has entered modern life, and he helped to constitute our understanding of the self” (183). Stephen Greenblatt, in Renaissance Self-fashioning, is more radical in his denial of early modern self-definition. One of the merits of this book is that it problematizes for our own time the situation of the self within Renaissance culture. Though a theory emerges from it, it is not without prior reflection upon alternative stands; it is therefore possible to develop one of these alternatives rather than to adhere to Greenblatt’s conclusion. “My subject,” Greenblatt states, “is self-fashioning from More to Shakespeare; my starting-point is quite simply that in sixteenth-century England there were both selves and a sense that they could be fashioned” (1). Greenblatt recognizes the obviousness of this statement, as well as the fact that “there are always selves,” thus recognizing that the concept of self cannot be rigidly linked with a sector of history. There are ever-present features among and within which the variations we are seeking to discover will occur: “a sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of address to the world, a structure of bounded desires,” as well as “some elements of deliberate shaping in the formation and expression of identity” (1). Though we tend to think of the sixteenth century as an era of considerable gain for the ability “to impose a shape upon oneself,” and more generally for “power to control identity – that of others at least as often as one’s own,” there are also many losses of freedom to family, state, religious institution. Greenblatt’s interest does not appear to be in a chronological framework that would contain the phenomenon; let the phenomenon find its own chronological framework, even if it upsets existing periodizations. At the core of the inquiry lies the observation of “an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” (2). The core of the phenomenon, then, has to do with at least the emergence of a certain degree of self-awareness and incipient self-appropriation, with the perception of oneself as being to some extent in charge of a self-image one can conceive, shape, and present to others as a distinct entity. This initial set of factors is presented, not as a given but as a dialectical principle against which, in every one of its relationships, an opposite force – be it theological, ethical, social, psychological, cultural –

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may arise and counteract the incipient autonomy of the self. Beyond a set of strongly symbolical examples Greenblatt does not claim to propose a history of the self in the sixteenth century but a method for ordering the knowledge we have of some particularly “complex and creative beings” (15). This method appears to be particularly well suited to our inquiry, since it can be expected that the transgressive experience of exceptional individuals such as Thomas More paves the way for a more collective emergence. In conclusion Greenblatt attributes overwhelming importance to culture, as opposed to the will and initiative of the individual, in the fashioning of the self. Having found – avowedly against his own initial expectations – that “fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions – family, religion, state – were inseparably intertwined” (256); that far from showing moments of “unfettered subjectivity,” the human subjects examined in detail were “remarkably unfree” and moulded by relations of power in a given society, Greenblatt concludes: Whenever I focused sharply upon a moment of apparently autonomous selffashioning, I found not an epiphany of identity freely chosen but a cultural artifact. If there remained traces of free choice, the choice was among possibilities whose range was strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force. (256)

Obviously, Greenblatt’s analysis here concerns early modern European culture. But in a further book, Marvelous Possessions, he also, though perhaps less directly, tackles the question of the self, that of the Other, in the context of its dramatic encounter when Europeans began to conquer and evangelize the New World. He pays special attention to the moment of first encounter, when the impact of the totally new upon the traveller is the strongest, the feeling of wonder at its highest, and its expression most revealing of the process of familiarization at the hands of the writer. The process he describes takes place between two cultures, since “the problem of the assimilation of the other is linked to what we may call […] the reproduction and circulation of mimetic capital” (1991, 6). Travellers’ reactions are culturally determined; for example, there quickly surfaced differences between Catholic and Protestant responses to rituals and festivities, conversions, non-Christian beliefs. Yet there is written evidence to the effect that voyagers who describe their experience in their accounts lived it in very personal ways. Wonder, as analysed by Greenblatt, had an affective, indeed a physiological basis, as for example in Léry’s description of the Topinambas’ religious singing and its effects upon him, the trembling of his heart, the delight he felt, the lasting imprint upon his

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musical memory even after twenty years. Thus an aesthetic element has recoded the image of primitive behaviour in a manner not dissimilar to the Renaissance recoding of ancient pagan mythology; it is treated as a personal event resisting novelty by dint of ideological recuperation. The point here is that while it is evident, and while both of Greenblatt’s books make more evident, that experience, especially if exotic, is framed and conditioned by the subject’s culture, he does not deny the personal, spontaneous aspects of experience. These are, by nature, more dispersed, singular, difficult to codify. But unless they are in some way theorized and allowed a measure of reality, we are simply describing encounters of cultures, and the study of the familiarization process is despoiled of its psychological base. Again, the latter is much more scantily documented; but even when it is amply documented, philosophers of culture will resist the singularity of the singular, as we saw with Taylor’s comment on Montaigne. In Renaissance Self-fashioning the link between the six personalities discussed is their social mobility; the actors in Marvelous Possessions are linked by extreme social and geographical mobility. In both, selffashioning strains against its outer limits, seeking some Other with or against whom to establish power relations for the I to mark. In Marvelous Possessions, additionally yet most relevantly, the Other is also a self. That was not in the script. Not only does the situation give concrete power to the explorer; it also gives him symbolical power to describe the Other. We know how unprepared travellers were for such an exploration of identities. In La Conquête de l’Amérique Todorov deals precisely with the “question of the other”: Je veux parler de la découverte que le je fait de l’autre … On peut découvrir les autres en soi, se rendre compte de ce qu’on n’est pas une substance homogène, et radicalement étrangère à tout ce qui n’est pas soi: je est un autre. Mais les autres sont de je aussi: des sujets comme moi, que seul mon point de vue, par lequel tous sont là-bas et je suis seul ici, sépare et distingue vraiment de moi. (11)

Learning to deal with these others involves the gradual revelation of the variety that also exists among them, and their conceptions of others. The question of the Other is deeply embedded in that of identity, if only because identity can only apprehend itself by differentiation. Whether from the point of view of linguistics or of psychoanalysis or of both (as in Lacan), alterity calls for identity. In the case of Columbus – whom Todorov calls by his Spanish name, Colon, connoting, in

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French, the Colonizer – the journals, though written to be read, hopefully even by the king and queen, exhibit a certain directness. In his greedy haste to discover and lay claim to as much territory as possible, Columbus must note and quickly categorize matters pertaining to new encounters. Todorov observes Colon’s tendency to assimilate what he sees and hears to knowledge he already possessed, so that his “hermeneutic” proceeds to read the people he meets and the natural sites he discovers as having already existed in the scheme of things. His Cratylic attachment to the shape of names exemplifies that attitude. Communication with native people, both verbal and non-verbal, holds a low priority for Colon; he sees them as part of the new landscapes. He stresses their similarities rather than their differences, considers them inferior, in need of protection, and honest or dishonest according to what they choose (or do not choose) to take away from their conquerors. There is no evidence of any in-depth or even superficial exploration by the Spanish of the Indian self and its perception of the newcomers. And let us not even mention the treatment of the female self. Thus, Todorov’s Colon wants the Indians to be like the Spanish and like himself; he is unconsciously and naïvely “assimilationist,” anxious – because of his affection for the Indians! – to see them adopt European customs, and even to bring back to Spain some who might later on return to interpret Christianity to their own people. Thus, free of the literary and institutional constraints that prevail in Spain, Colon appears to act as the visible obverse of those at home who use their power-seeking against closer beings, such as their women, or against themselves when melancholy possesses them; he coincides with the hierarchical, chauvinistic, monological personality of his later myth – passionately subjecting others, while submitting himself to his sovereigns. Colon’s is an extreme example. Other travellers, explorers, and conquerors show a variety of attitudes towards the other, which Todorov is able to arrange into a typology of attitudes towards distant cultures. In Théories du symbole Todorov had proposed the concept of typology as a tool in the service of heterology, which is discourse about the Other providing a way out of the quandary between the classically suppressed self and the romantically unleashed self. It is consistent with our postmodern pluralism, and enables one to look back on the Conquest, its history, and European opinion about it (for example, Montaigne’s “Des cannibales”) and to evaluate more concretely degrees of insight into and curiosity about the Other at the time. Unlike Todorov, Foucault gave the premodern self little credit for possessing any kind of creativity, reflexivity, inwardness, in short,

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subjectivity that would not on examination dissolve into intersubjectivity. In Les Mots et les Choses he visualizes the Renaissance mind in a universe of sameness in which all signs refer to an already existing and fixed meaning. In that perspective the rediscovery of classical antiquity did not change the situation, since both Scripture and classical Greek and Latin literature refer to that already known universe that speaks to man in nature, with the result that the epistemic situation of the early modern self is, if we may coin such a term, infrasubjective. “In the treasure handed down to us by Antiquity,” Foucault writes, the value of language lay in the fact that it was the sign of things. There is no difference between the visible marks that God has stamped upon the surface of the earth, so that we may know its inner secrets, and the legible words that the Scriptures, or the sages of Antiquity, have set down in the books preserved for us by tradition. The relation to these texts is of the same nature as the relation to things; in both cases there are signs that must be discovered. (33)

Further on, he adds: The truth of all these marks – whether they are woven into nature itself or whether they exist in lines on parchments and in libraries – is everywhere the same: coeval with the institution of God … The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness, and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for those who can read it, one vast single text. (34)

One should not judge Foucault’s attitude towards the Renaissance mind by this text alone, which does, however, provide us with a point of departure for questioning the concept of the static, downtrodden self deprived of means to depart from that world of sameness, to change it, to expand it. In a way, this image evokes our sympathy, as does that of the insane who are shown, in L’Histoire de la folie, to be obliterated from history. What signs are we to seek in attempting to grasp the process whereby the self in turn becomes origin and agency? It is not the periodization of this change that concerns us but rather the mode of appearance and the nature of its signs. However, should there be strong evidence of more self-aware, self-motivated direction than allowed for by Foucault or Greenblatt, it might mean that “modern identity” sets in at the premodern stage, or that the criteria of modernity should be reviewed in some depth, or both. One fruitful experiment consists in examining textual signs in texts that are not thematically devoted to the self but might indirectly, even unconsciously yield some of its symptoms. The text would thus be used

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as a hermeneutic touchstone. With that purpose in mind, let us return to Luther’s statement and compare it a text written by Jan Hus under comparable circumstances. A systematic and explicit philosophy of the self is, in their respective contexts, the furthest thing from their minds. Luther and Hus are concerned with the role of the self pitted against the powers that be in a combat that presents itself as exegetical but the stakes of which are existential, since the cost of resistance may be unbearable. In Luther’s statement quoted above we note the frequent return of the first-person pronoun – no wonder, since the ultimatum to which this statement was a response summoned him to say clearly and definitively whether he would or would not renounce his interpretation of Scripture. “Unless I am convinced” (my emphasis): In order for Luther to change his mind, the powers that be would have to supply scriptural proof or self-evident argumentation contradicting his own. Implied is an assumption of ultimate personal responsibility, which in turn presupposes on the part of the subject a strong measure of confidence in his own ability to discern the truth, to be a hermeneutic conscience that the Spirit can use. (Against this, it could of course be argued that all major breaches of theological orthodoxy claim divine inspiration and therefore attribute the ultimate responsibility to the transcendent source of that inspiration rather than to the human self.) Yet whether historically, theologically, or epistemologically, it is hard to see how the cases of extreme courage and resistance that are our examples could have occurred in the absence of personalities of exceptional strength, discernment, argumentative resourcefulness, all of which are leading psychological characteristics of the major reformers. But these exceptional individuals herald a more general phenomenon: Protestantism will argue that all selves, exceptional or not, have the ability to interpret Scripture. The question then arises: does the truth only work its way through the interpreter’s mind, as could conceivably be said in the case of the old ontological argument for the existence of God, which sees the mind picturing the perfection of God through a kind of negative and passive reflection? Or does the mind co-operate in generating or at least transforming the truth as the person makes it his own? Luther’s statement, in comparison with Augustine’s or Anselm’s grasp of the perfection of God, implies a new element: a conflict of authorities. On the side of the recurrent “I” there is Scripture, with which the I claims a harmonious relationship, and evident reason, to which the I also claims access. The I distrusts its obvious opponents, the pope and the council, because they have often erred and contradicted

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themselves. Though the dogma of papal infallibility had not yet been declared, the I takes a considerable risk in accusing the papacy of error. In confronting the multiple and hierarchical, the singular I calls upon two inward, non-institutional forces: conscience and God’s word. Already mentioned earlier in the statement as Scripture in connection with evident reason, “God’s Word” could be, in the second occurrence, a mere synonym; yet it is more. Scripture and evident reason are objective, universal entities. But now Scripture as God’s Word becomes personalized and internalized as it grips the individual conscience: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” The dominant agent is still God through his Word, whose captive Luther’s conscience is. Yet the prisoner is not passive; he is mobilized, so to speak, because of the task at hand. As he fulfils this task, he is implicitly capable of independent judgment, which leads him to hold fast to Scripture as he adduces it. These last words especially signal that the relationship between conscience and the Word of God is not merely tautological. The last reason given by Luther for maintaining his stand is that it is not safe or right to act against conscience. This is crucial for our inquiry, since conscience is thus given as the ultimate key to the understanding of the will of God. Along with the mind that interprets the meaning of Scripture, conscience mediates the divine direction. Now conscience is – and has it not always been? – both subjective and intersubjective; in Luther’s framework this translates into an encounter between the transcendent and the immanent. Surely the point at stake is the share of inwardness, self-direction, responsibility on the part of the human being. Let us take the risk of saying that, in Luther’s case, even taking into account that the will is unfree, the semiotics of the crucial text under examination speak of interaction – that God needs an active, self-aware, responsible I to embody the resistant stance. A related example could be taken from a more distant past. In the summer of 1415 Jan Hus, condemned by the Council of Constance to death by fire, writes to friends and authorities from his Franciscan prison cell. In the following excerpt from a letter of 27 June 1415 he takes personal responsibility for the interpretation of Scripture he had offered throughout his life as preacher and teacher. “You should also know,” he writes to members of the University of Prague, “that I have neither revoked nor abjured a single article. The Council desired that I declare all and every article drawn from my books as false. I refused unless they should show its falsity by Scripture” (198). He assumes, of course, that the meaning of scriptural passages is there to be understood and is in no way of human making; and this perhaps denotes a

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more “medieval” attitude than Luther’s. Yet Hus is not silent about his own inner reactions and resources: I said that I detest whatever false sense exists in any of the articles, and commit it to the correction of the Lord Jesus Christ, who knows my sincere intention and does not interpret it in a wrong sense which I do not intend. I exhort you also in the Lord that whatever wrong sense you may be able to discern in those articles, that you relinquish them, but always preserve the truth that is intended. (198–9)

In this letter, as compared with Luther’s text, the actorial situation is dramatically simplified. No conscience acts as intermediary, and, although there is a council, no hostile pope is mentioned. Christ is the sole guarantor of truth in Scripture; the human mind either intuits this truth or does not. This, however, places all the more responsibility upon the human interpreter, a responsibility Hus shoulders by saying that if he has erred, his writings should simply be abandoned. Until and unless his error is proved, however, the interpretation he has provided stands. It should be noted that, although this may appear to be a typically Protestant attitude of resistance, Catholic figures in comparable circumstances of embattlement (Joan of Arc, Thomas More) offer similar arguments. But expression of resistance on the ground of conscience is only one form of manifestation of the self which I have called paradoxical because of its at least seemingly unexpected, transgressive presence in the early modern period. There are also more direct expressions of thought with respect to the nature and role of the self; one of these is a statement by Calvin concerning the reception of scriptural truth by the believer, so necessary to salvation. It occurs in chapter 7 of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which deals with the testimony of the Spirit in establishing the authority of Scripture: Let this point therefore stand: that those whom the Holy Scripture has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and that Scripture indeed is selfauthenticated; hence it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning. And the certainty it deserves with us, it attains by the testimony of the Spirit. For even if it wins reverence for itself by its own majesty, it seriously affects us only when it is sealed upon our hearts through the Spirit. (80)

In the Calvinian context there can be little doubt that the source of the certainty is God, who imparts it to the elect. But the text does take into account the psychological disposition of the elect, one of emotional acquiescence without which the spirit will not fulfil its action. It could, of

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course, be argued that redemption is still a matter of divine rather than human agency, and that whoever the elect are as individuals, the psychology of salvation applies to them all. This multiplication by the number of the elect, however, does not destroy the relevance of each individual selfhood to the process of salvation. Predestination may be arbitrary and in that sense override the human; but once this is taken into account, predestination only strengthens the case for the importance of the self as it personally engages in the adventure and responds with its heart, as Calvin himself says, to the call of grace. These examples, drawn from reformed theological thought and historical experience, represent only part of the much larger scene involving the early modern episteme in both centuries at stake. My title mentioned the emergence of the paradoxical self: it can now be seen that this is because selfhood so often encounters, and defines itself in terms of, alterity; also because of the contradiction that had arisen between the ambition the Renaissance had for the cultivation of individuality and the fervour with which the historical possibility of it was now so often denied. Using Poliziano and Montaigne as initial examples, David Quint comments as follows upon the effects of humanistic philology upon the individual: As the humanist saw how the ancients differed historically, he perceived his own historical difference and individuality. It was, in fact, the recognition that his experience produced circumstances that the ancients did not and could not have known that … authorized the modern’s appropriation of their style and thought to his own purposes and personality. He was presumably repeating the process of self-creation through reading. (Parker and Quint, 2–3)

It is well known that Burckhardt considered the emergence of the individual to be the leading characteristic of the Italian Renaissance, that the humanist educational program presupposed “an individual endowed with the freedom and capacity both to create himself and to shape his social and political environment” (Parker and Quint, 5). That the poststructuralist project needs to modify this picture so as to undo the rigidly personal identity of the text is self-evident; the demise of the hermeneutic relationship between text and reader “leaves all meaning subject to the unsettling play of linguistic and semiotic codes” (Parker and Quint, 7). The question then arises, with respect to our problematic, whether, in order to satisfy that perceived present-day need, it is necessary in retrospect to obliterate the phase of growing self-knowledge, of experimentation, of reflection (as in Montaigne) upon the struggle between the public and the private self.

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More than the theologians we mentioned, Montaigne thematizes the self. In recent scholarship, as illustrated by Richard Regosin’s The Matter of My Book, the trend has been to consider that the book heralds at the same time the enshrinement and the death of the author. A number of studies, including Rhétorique de Montaigne, edited by Frank Lestringant, have shown that the text is rhetorically disciplined; even its sprezzatura is self-aware. Does this contradict the “cornucopian” character that Terence Cave attributes to the Renaissance text? In my view it does not, as long as we understand that the rhetorical proliferation does not escape Montaigne, that he is in fact a knowledgeable participant in it, though he does not dominate the flow of meaning and often finds himself overwhelmed by its vagaries. He does, however, want to strive for consubstantiality with the book, so that his dream of being remembered as himself will be fulfilled. It is Montaigne’s wager that if his self becomes a verbally embodied self, posterity will be unable to ignore its uniqueness. Whether he succeeded is a matter of interpretation, but there can be no doubt that he problematized the question for us in a manner that forestalls the theoretical stance according to which he could not do so. His concept of willing, and of the role of the will, is a matter of record: “Il n’y a rien en bon essiant en nostre puissance, que la volonté” (i:7). “For him,” writes Tilde Sankovitch on this point, “volonté” is the repository of the deepest self, of that kernel of the self which is its only constant, its self-ness, which does not exclude death but, on the contrary, contains it. As such, “volonté” participates in all the vagaries, the doubts and insecurities, the fears and vacillations of the self, but it is also, for good or evil, the only instrument of power at the self’s disposition. Through the power of the will the self is able to define itself, and to interpret the surrounding world. (56)

The representation of this inward person is both Montaigne’s problem and his ultimate object. Nothing in the Essays even exists apart from the ongoing inner theatre into which everything is brought, and where Montaigne constantly endows elements of time and space with subjective qualities to be projected into the text. It is this dialectic of inwardness and textualization that becomes the very special model of selfhood that is Montaigne’s. Presence and absence to oneself must alternate. That is perhaps the earliest lesson to be learned from the quest of the absent friend; the cry “parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi” can only follow a deeply self-aware process of individuation. Human beings are not interchangeable; friends’ personalities coincide just as much because of their differences as of their commonalities.

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Equally important for the understanding of Montaigne’s subjectivity and subjectivity according to Montaigne is the body, which intervenes more massively in book 3 than in the first two. The uniqueness of each body is a crucial part of the history of its self-awareness. (Erasmus’s corpusculum, to which his correspondence alludes so often, corroborates this dimension of Montaigne.) But with Montaigne, singularity is further complicated by the elusiveness of the psyche even in relation to itself, and immeasurably more the psyche of the Other. The thoughts of others gathered from books are far easier to internalize than conversation with living men and women, and to transform into dialogue. It should also be observed that the dialogue genre itself, which in appearance seeks to represent communication among subjects, is often impeded from reaching its goal by its inherent rhetoricity. Yet it does help unconcealment of the subject to itself and others when it unveils inner conflict, as is the case in Petrarch’s Secretum and Marguerite de Navarre’s Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne. True, the dichotomies dramatized in these texts are theologically based, but they simultaneously also bring into play the subject’s visceral awareness of its own mortality. The rise of subjectivity in the early modern period always remained paradoxical inasmuch as it had to break out of the moulds of the expected while also functioning within it, whereas in postmodernity the unfolding of the subject is once again contradicted and paradoxical as the culture of identity becomes depersonalizing whenever its interests override those of the self, whose liberty was to be its ultimate goal.

works cited Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. John Allen. Vol. 1. London: Baldwin 1813. Delumeau, Jean. Civilisation de la Renaissance. Paris: Arthaud 1967. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les Choses). New York: Random House 1970. – Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Histoire de la folie). New York: Vintage Books 1988. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1980. – Marvelous Possessions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991. Hus, Jan. The Letters of John Hus. Trans. Matthew Spinka. Manchester: Manchester University Press 1971. Lestringant, Frank, éd. Rhétorique de Montaigne. Paris: Champion 1985. Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works. Vol. 32, Career of the Reformer ii. Ed. George W. Forrell. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press 1958.

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Marguerite de Navarre. Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne. Catania: F. Battiato 1920. Parker, Patricia, and David Quint, eds. Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1986. Regosin, Richard L. The Matter of My Book: Montaigne’s Essais as the Book of the Self. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1977. Sankovitch, Tilde. “The Fruition of Loss Through Memory: Ceres’ Inscription in the Essais.” In Montaigne and the Gods: The Mythological Key to the Essays, ed. Daniel Martin. Amherst: Hestia Press 1993. Taylor, Charles. The Moral Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1989. Todorov, Tzvetan. La Conquête de l’Amérique: la question de l’Autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1982. – Théories du symbole. Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1985.

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17 The Renewed Meaning of the Renaissance Dialogue

To work in the humanities, particularly in early modern studies, forces upon us a double sense of time: on the one hand, all documents and monuments from even the most distant past, at least those that have been stored, preserved, printed, discovered, reclaimed, are at our disposal in a kind of eternal present, and we feel a kinship with all these creations of human imagination; on the other, when we attempt to make them our own, we very quickly discover the immensity of distance to be bridged and that, in order to exist in history, the phenomena of the past need to be reappropriated by us. Historical discourse is our own present-day discourse, reaching out with every intention to resurrect the past in itself, only to make us realize that, far from resurrecting that which was, we are constructing a new object for and of today. To recognize this is not a haphazard or superficial approach to a complicated task; on the contrary: the kind of apprehension of historical situations in their uniqueness that has been invoked by some of the deconstructive thinkers demands profound understanding of the historical situation under study, and certainly in-depth information about it so that there can be intellectual involvement and the distance can be

Provost’s Lecture Series and Early Modern Studies Conference, Ball State University, Oct. 1991; guest lecture, University of Miami, Dec. 1992, and University of Victoria, Mar. 1993.

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bridged. Deconstructive thought upon literary history in particular has reminded us how reductive literary history was of the personal, social, and ideological aspects of texts when, in its discursive logic, it forgot any of these aspects in order to fit texts into what has been dubbed “la grande syntagmatique du discours historico-littéraire” (Krysinski, 181). On this relationship between ourselves and the history of others Claudio Guillén wrote some dazzling lines in his Entre lo uno y lo diverso: “What occurred is not retold as such, but inasmuch as it intersects with the present. The past is neither the merely similar, nor the simply remote and singular … The past is thus a powerful metaphor of our own time … Postmodernity questions and thinks at the same time in the present and in the past indicative tense, intertwining contemporaneity with history: we are that which we are, and that which we have been” (43). Interhistoricity is thus a kind of empathy with the bygone, the remote, the other – not an arbitrary empathy but one that finds, and feeds upon, links that eventually allow cultures that have been very selfinvolved to begin to understand one another. Although these ideas are powerful selling points for early modern studies, it is my view that they would hardly strike a chord in the minds of students of today if they were not in some way already there, not as a theoretical fashion but as an inherent need. In a very fundamental way our minds need to struggle their way through something that is not ourselves. This is well illustrated by the late Northrop Frye’s musings upon the nature of higher education, upon his own intellectual development, and the manner in which profound involvement with the mind of another made him become himself: “I think it advisable for every critic proposing to devote his life to literary scholarship to pick a major writer of literature as a kind of spiritual preceptor for himself … I am not speaking, of course, of any sort of moral model, but it seems to me that growing up inside a mind so large that one has no sense of claustrophobia within it is an irreplaceable experience in humane studies. Some kind of transmission by seed goes on here too” (15). Surprisingly, we have just reached, by what may seem a detour, our central point, which is the ongoing relevance of dialogue. The Renaissance dialogue as we know it is first of all metaphorical of something very important about humanist learning and communication in Renaissance times; and it is secondly an important intellectual link between the Renaissance and ourselves, in terms both of what dialogue represented then and of what it represents now. In the work just quoted Frye also refers to dialogue, in a manner so unflattering that it will serve as a safeguard to our study, lest we too

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hastily and naïvely attribute to the Renaissance dialogue the ability to improve understanding among human beings. Commenting upon anti-intellectualism in the university of the 1960s, Frye interjects: What seems not to have been noticed is the fact that there is really no such thing as “dialogue.” Just as some children try to behave like the heroes and heroines in the stories they read, so “dialogue” is a literary convention taken to be a fact of life. The literary convention comes from Plato […] and we notice how clearly aware Plato is of the fact that unstructured discussion is a collection of solipsistic monologues […] Nothing happens in Plato until one person, generally Socrates, assumes control of the argument and the contributions of the others are largely reduced to punctuation. This means, not that dialogue has turned into monologue or democracy into dictatorship, but that Socrates has discovered a dialectic, and has committed himself to following it wherever it may lead. (46)

This remark, which in Frye’s particular situation was meant to illustrate non-communication, will benefit our examination of the Renaissance dialogue both as a reminder of its rhetorical nature, aiming, initially at least, at persuading and even silencing the opponent rather than at modifying the viewpoint of the main speaker; and as a sane warning against the persistent nostalgia of the twentieth century for more and better understanding among people, and for more and better dialogue in that sense, while technology often appears to skew the very communication that it is expected to improve. Frye’s healthy scepticism reminds us that we should not project our own wishful thinking upon the Renaissance psyche, that structures are structures, capable perhaps of facilitating encounters of minds but not necessarily of turning them into spiritual or even intellectual communion. Here I must face my own research critically. Years ago I began to study the Renaissance dialogue, its history, its invariants, its literary devices, with the thought that between the decline of scholasticism and the advent of Protestant and Catholic dogmaticism or at least fideism there had been a space – how extended it might have been depended on each country – for exploratory philosophical discussion that implied, in the mentality of the thinkers of that country, the ability to fully imagine, and thus in imagination assume, the position of the other. Thus my work, in the beginnings at least, and studying mainly French texts, was probing the hypothesis of an “age of dialogue” that would be at least a major part of the sixteenth century. Why this would be a tempting hypothesis, precisely in terms of “rewriting” and “rereading” the Renaissance, should be asked in the spirit of interhistoricity characterized by Claudio Guillén. It somehow draws together the

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political instabilities and the cultural misunderstandings of the past decades, both in the West and between East and West, and the existential need to understand particular human beings and be understood by them; not necessarily something sentimental, no emotional echo of a “fellowship of kindred hearts,” but at least the linguists’ bottom-line communication, in which information is uttered and received. In order that it may be so, there must at the very least be the possibility of consensus on the meaning of words; yet in how many particular cultural situations in our world, in how many intercultural and international situations, are words subverted! And so the Bakhtinian idea of an ideology that underlies language and in which consciousnesses communicate constitutes a strong philosophical temptation, especially if we also remember that in the Poetics of Dostoyevsky Bakhtin did review the classical sources of the dialogue as antecedents to his own doctrine of dialogicity. Interestingly, he did not deny dialogicity to violently satirical, Menippean texts. This might be very important for our modern grasp of the dialogue: dialogical communication need not be all sweetness and light: it may be polemical, even conflictual. Dialogue occurs when divergent visions are really confronted, without one obliterating the other. In the sixteenth century, very broadly speaking, authors of dialogues basically follow one of three classical models (or combine characteristics of two of these): the Platonic, the Ciceronian, and that of Lucian of Samosata. Dialogues modelled after the first two appear headed for concord; those modelled after Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead or Dialogues of the Gods thrive on discord. Disagreement, even violent, does not catapult the opponent out of existence; on the contrary, it confirms his existence. Perhaps we could coin a phrase: we disagree; therefore you are! There is a text by Pontus de Tyard, the sixteenth-century French poet and philosopher, that epitomizes this point about contradiction helping to make the opponent present and real. Tyard had already written five dialogues covering a range of philosophical subjects: poetry, music, the nature of time, that of the cosmos, that of humanity. The last dialogue, entitled Mantice, is about astrology. Whereas the first five make speakers interact or at least seem to interact, usually in sets of three so that the argument is not built on a simplistic opposition of two viewpoints, this last dialogue does not concretely picture any interaction whatsoever; three characters pronounce a long discourse each, the first against belief in astrology, the second in favour of it, the third, in a role of arbitration, condemning astrology, but with nuances. This disposition has led a critic to doubt whether this is a dialogue at all, with this absence of interaction and final agreement (Bokdam, 39).

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(Incidentally, in my view, final agreement is not necessarily a sign of ultimate reconciliation but a closure, a full-stop that a dominant character may impose to end the discussion and impose his viewpoint. Whether real dialogue has occurred would then depend more on the manner in which opponents grappled with one another’s thought, and also impelled the reader to do so, than upon the final conclusion). In Mantice, with its tryptich of speeches, what creates dialogue is obviously not a quick exchange of sentences but the argument-by-argument response of each participant to the others. This is also why a discussion of Renaissance dialogues in general should not merely focus on those that consist solely in such staged conversations – this would even exclude works, such as Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, or its model, Boccacio’s Decameron, where dialogue serves as a framework welding together a set of novellas – but should focus on how in all the doxographic genres (treatises, epistles, commentaries, as well as dialogues) the position of the Other or others, that which constitutes some alternative in the search for truth, is treated. Those texts that are strictly in dialogue form can then serve as emblems for this discussion because they are so numerous, because they provide us with a typology ranging from closure to a measure of openness, and last but not least because they can serve as groundwork to reflect upon our central problem, that of the status of the Other’s vision. No dialogue by itself solves that question with respect to Renaissance mentalities, but together they help us to problematize it. This is indeed where (to return to the possible rapport between this situation of the Renaissance dialogue and what might spur our interest in it today) Renaissance minds had to come to terms with the massive impact of new realities bringing home the Other, others, otherness: “l’altérité.” It has been said, in connection with the geographical explorations of the period, that the discovery of discoveries is that of the Other, of other worlds and other societies rather than a merely material expansion of spatial horizons, though undoubtedly that too contributed to the expansion of intellectual horizons (Mollat du Jourdin, 306). Add that to all the “otherness” that, spurred by the printing press and despite the existence of censorship, came through the massive influx of pre-Christian classical texts as well as, increasingly, theologically unorthodox texts, and you will get a measure of the potential fragmentation of truth and the consequent unsettling that this meant. (Or am I again projecting conventional images of a unified medieval vision versus a fragmented Renaissance vision into this discussion? Am I forgetting that Renaissance people, especially those who were not elite humanists, did not so much depend for their psychological security upon a smoothly unified intellectual truth as upon the presence of

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another truth that transcended traditions and schools of thought and of which all human formulations were fragments?) When they turned to relativistic thinking it was not with respect to that ultimate truth but to their own ability to attain it. There were probably more times when theological or political necessities would dominate over intellectual inquiry than times for indulging in that inquiry, and for comparing claims to validity. In many cases the same author might stage a many-sided theological or exegetical or philosophical debate in some of his writings and violently satirical controversy in others; consider, for example, the difference in Erasmus between the Convivium religiosum and such wickedly playful attacks on contemporary abuses as the Peregrinatio religionis ergo or Abbatis et eruditae. Attention has already been drawn to the difference in atmosphere within the dialogues of Pontus de Tyard, between, say, the discussion Discours du temps, de l’an et de ses parties on the nature of time among three actors, the poet Maurice Scève defending the importance of mathematical laws, Tyard himself bringing his vast classical knowledge to bear upon the discussion, and the priestly presence of Hieromnime, grilling one another on meanings and interpretations; and the violence of the Mantice, in which so much passion was vested because man would certainly be freer with respect to both God and nature if everything about his life was not forever predictable, but also because of the fear, among the more pious defenders of astrological divination, that if you destroy belief in it you might also undermine the basis of any belief whatsoever. Thus, although in the eyes of specialists in the field the classification of these dialogues is important (say the division into expository or exploratory, polemical or philosophical), what matters as an icon of Renaissance culture is the combined picture of all the dialogues, whether they be among actors of a literary dialogue or mutual responses among separate texts. What particularly interests us is the emerging presence of the other person, who might also possess a fragment of truth. It should not be surmised that the Renaissance thinkers themselves were thoroughly unaware of this emergence. In the second dialogue of Bonaventure des Périers’s Cymbalum mundi we learn that Mercury brought to earth the philosophers’ stone, where it was shattered into tiny pieces; and we see three theologians, who by anagram can be identified as Luther, Erasmus, and Bucerus (Martin Bucer), desperately sifting sand to retrieve the fragments, each of them insulting the others and claiming that his little bit of sand is the whole philosophers’ stone. There have been many interpretations of Des Périers’s thought, but whether we choose the one about his being a non-believer or the one about his Hesuchism, or again his “libertinage spirituel,” close to

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Evangelism, we are still left with a warning of pluralism being the case among human minds. There are also dialogues that choose their actors far beyond the realms of contemporary theological discussion. Two of these occupy, chronologically, the extreme limits of an inquiry such as this. In the De pace fidei (1453) by Nicolas of Cusa, a conversation that takes place in heaven involves Jews and Moslems as well as Christians in theological argument over even the concept of the Trinity. Needless to say, the Christian view prevails, not, however, without offering the reader’s imagination (following that of the author) the vision of those who do not share in the Christian faith. A similar staging a century and a half later characterizes Jean Bodin’s Heptaplomeres. In France at that point positions had once again hardened, and the atmosphere of philosophical discussion that marked the middle of the century had been destroyed by the Wars of Religion and those of the Holy League; but, without hiding his preferences, Bodin, in the setting of a panthotèque – a kind of museum containing samples or images of everything in nature so that the whole universe seems to take part in the discussion (and this device demonstrates the importance of the setting in these dialogues) – again proposes to the imagination of his contemporaries a picture of theological and philosophical diversity. It is this spirit of experimentation that holds particular appeal for the humanities today, which in their very humaneness are coming to terms with unprecedented manifestations of cultural and ethnic diversity, gender difference, regional realities, a whole new interaction of the universal and the particular. We are rewriting and rereading the Renaissance because we are rewriting and rereading ourselves as humans. In this perspective, the question at issue is whether the immense corpus of Renaissance dialogues that begins with those of the Quattrocento in Italy has in substance remained, however lively its colouring may be, a corpus of teaching texts in which the writer, represented by a dominant character or a set of dominant characters and viewpoint in the dialogue, is the teacher while the reader, represented by the weaker side, is a passive student; or whether at least part of the corpus, at privileged places and times, is of a more exploratory nature, and leaves the reader with alternatives. Was dialogue capable of providing a model for unrestrained discussion, and does the dialogue form sustain that model in a way that significantly differs from its manifestations in the previous and the following period? Was there in fact an epistemic transformation that would be manifest in the history of the dialogue? In one sense our question is part of a much more general discussion and must be considered within its framework, but the answer must also

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be documented by examples from the Renaissance dialogue itself and from theoretical views contemporary to it. The general discussion ultimately relates to the frontiers of undecidability. Humanism, with its many variations, can obviously be said to give an extraordinary role to human decision-making and to rhetoric as its dramatization. As long as the truth sought by a dialogue is topically within the field of action-oriented ethics or of scientific knowledge implicitly but firmly grounded in orthodoxy, undecidabilty pertains to practice; it is non-threatening, and encouragingly illustrative of human potential for freedom. The Dialogue de l’ortografe (1550) by Jacques Peletier du Mans is just what its title indicates: a lively debate about spelling. That does not mean that its topic is non-controversial; as a matter of fact it was bound to touch off confrontations, since the author proposed to change the spelling of the French language completely by bringing in a simplified phonetic system. Thus, the balanced form of argumentation could indeed constitute a model for truth-seeking attentive to divergent viewpoints. At the same time, it neither transgressed nor undermined the established ontological or even moral truths. The Dialogues of Guy de Brués, by contrast, in a most artfully balanced confrontation of two speakers of prestige – including the poet Ronsard – against two others, problematize the very bases of moral values, law, access to any truth. The “Nouveaux académiciens,” whose theses the dialogue is designed to disprove, do in fact challenge the validity of rationally derived propositions and take every opportunity to demonstrate their relativeness. In this case there occurs open, ordered dialogue where both sides are treated with respect stylistically, are given equivalent access to speech, and are allowed to argue for themselves so that the discussion works in utramque partem, creating precisely the opportunity for open discussion the historical existence of which we are attempting to circumscribe. By the same token, dialogue carries with it the risk of vulnerability that may alarm the guardians, or set off the mechanisms, of closure. In saying this, of course, I am not thinking only of texts strictly couched in dialogue form but of others that work internally as open dialogue, such as Rabelais’s Third Book, where Panurge’s mock-heroic quest for an answer to his question about the advisability of marriage functions as a narrative translation of indecision – that is, of the potential undecidability of truth. In an article entitled “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory” Victoria Kahn probes Renaissance precedents to a very recent situation in which there occurs a resistance to theory in the heart of theory itself. “When we recall with Paul de Man that the humanities have traditionally been defined in terms of the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and

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logic (dialectic), the conservative resistance to theory can be seen as resistance to the way in which rhetoric puts in question the epistemological stability of language, and with language the trivium itself” (Kahn, 373). This can occur in diverse forms at any time in history, and Victoria Kahn sees an important manifestation of it in the humanist movement: “humanism can be defined in the first instance as a rhetorical practice that resists theory conceived of as an epistemological project; but this first resistance is part and parcel of a more complicated, pedagogically motivated resistance to theory conceived of as undecidability” (374). It is precisely these two complementary and interrelated tendencies that we have been observing in the history of the dialogue, particularly the philosophical dialogue that builds consensus upon speculative issues, constantly displacing by rhetorical means any crystallization of meaning but also constantly pining for that crystallization. While in Ramus theory is identified with the pedagogical content, humanism dies in the process. But this is precisely not the case earlier on, when humanism lives through its resistance to the monologicity of theory, insisting on “intersubjective dialogue or rhetoric in utramque partem as the model of human cognition and action” (388). Thus Kahn finds in the Renaissance practice of the dialogue a metaphor but also proof of a quest for alternatives and sees it linked in a privileged way with the most recent manifestations of “resistance to theory.” This linkage should not, however, rob our modern perception of the humanistic phenomenon of its distinguishing characteristics. These are best epitomized in Erasmus, whose anti-dogmaticism is systematic yet does not crystallize into a new anti-dogmatic dogmaticism, partly because he is capable of turning his rhetorical irony against himself but also, and mainly, because truth for him is a Person and glimmers of it occur in persons and are exchanged among persons, in dialogue. “C’est dans le dialogue vivant des esprits incarnés qu’Erasme recherche la vérité, comme jadis Socrate et comme le feront plus tard les philosophes classiques, même si le dialogue est dirigé par le philosophe, meneur de jeu … Presque tout d’ailleurs est dialogue dans l’oeuvre d’Erasme … même les exposés théoriques” (Margolin, 51). In a number of the Colloquies, as in countless other Renaissance dialogues rhetorically designed to communicate a given message to the reader, the contest may be unequal between the criticizing and the criticized speaker or phenomenon, but it is a real and lively contest. In Proci et puellae, for example, the lovelorn style in which Pamphilus expresses his plight would be recognized by the readers of Erasmus as pseudoPetrarchan, and thus lend familiar traits and strategies to the impatient suitor. Quite obviously, Maria’s good sense, adherence to reality,

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knowledge of contemporary law – she refuses to pronounce the formula “I am yours,” which would constitute a binding promise to Pamphilus – will in the end prevail over Pamphilus’s rhetorical attempts to disguise his plainly amorous designs. Although the dialogue is fastpaced, the resolution of the dispute is neither rapid nor automatic: gradually, Pamphilus is won over to the real world of mutual knowledge, responsibility, and family integration that condition Christian marriage. But his prior views have had their hour in the court of love. In this case, the textual “happening” that signals at least the possibility of such a happening in the real world consists in the fact that against all conventional odds Maria succeeds in bringing Pamphilus closer to a transformation of his own attitudes. An even more persuasive example of Erasmus’s dialogical use of the colloquy form arises from Inquisitio de fide (1524). To understand this point we have to trace the “philological circle” from text to context and back. At the level of auctorial structure and mutual access to speech, it is immediately apparent that Aulus is in the position of questioner and Barbatius in that of answerer, so that the latter supplies the more definitive position. In a catechism situation this would give the questioner a purely instrumental role; furthermore, we could say that Aulus represents Erasmus and that Barbatius is Luther, given all the signs of pre-existing dispute at the outset of the colloquy. The discussion concerns the Apostles’ Creed. As we read on we realize that Barbatius speaks in a surprisingly Erasmian voice for the major portion of the colloquy, even in the passage concerning belief in the Holy Church, at which point Barbatius separates the Church as a human, historical institution from the communion of saints as a spiritual reality. Virtually all the mutual teasing occurs at the level of personalities, not dogma. In fact the two actors agree so much that the colloquy must be classified among the convivial and therefore basically harmonious ones, a classification confirmed by the jocular references to lunch at the end, after Aulus has pointedly asked Barbatius why he is separating from “us” in the absence of any substantive theological disagreement. History supplies the missing link: this text summarizes Erasmus’s painful and thorough reflection upon the Lutheran positions, begun in 1518. It shows Catholics and Lutherans in agreement on the basic tenets of the faith as embodied in the Apostles’ Creed. It represents, so to say, Erasmus’s last chance of not declaring himself against Luther. It was published in March 1524, six months before De libero arbitrio. We may therefore consider it a sort of final, regretful statement of what might have been; an opinion by Erasmus, before he issued De libero arbitrio, that Catholics and Lutherans did in

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fact agree on the essential articles of Christianity and ought to have avoided or prevented schism … Whatever we may think of the adequacy or utility of such an atitude, it is at any rate worth remembering that Erasmus had not reached his conclusions hastily … [the] facts are that he published in March a dialogue inviting his readers to infer that the break between Catholics and Lutherans was not a quarrel over the really essential matters. (Thompson, 177–8)

This also implies that the question of the free or unfree will would become more essential to Luther than to himself in the ensuing months. For our purposes, as we return to the text itself, what matters is the mode of disquisition whereby Erasmus dramatizes and projects his own hesitancies: at that point he is still, vis-à-vis Luther, a man of dialogue within himself, listening intently to the other voice and willing to give it exposure, albeit with some irony. Donald Gilman has drawn together the scattered strains of theoretical discourse on the dialogue at the time of the Renaissance in a much more complete way than had been attempted previously. In doing so, he provides students of the Renaissance dialogue with a conceptual framework that, far from being linked to a static image of the dialogue at any moment of the fifteenth or sixteenth century in any particular place, remains valid as the dialogue form evolves, and helps to situate that evolution. In brief, there is a strong degree of consensus among both Renaissance and present-day theoreticians on a typology based on a series of distinctions between the didactic function of the dialogue (dominated by the teacher and serving a fixed universe of the kind from which, according to Foucault, the Renaissance mind cannot detach itself) and a rhetorical, consensus-seeking one in which new truths, or at least new perspectives on truth are allowed to appear, and in my view this can only be linked with a more dynamic world-view continuously open to alternatives. Thus dialogue, with Sperone Speroni especially, tracks, aided by the principles of mimesis and decorum, the meanderings of the search for truth in a world where minds are only beginning to meet, even occasionally to collide, on paths not necessarily traced by prior authority.

works cited Bokdam, Sylviane. Introduction to Pontus de Tyard, Mantice, Discours de la divination de vérité par astrologie. Genève: Droz 1990. Frye, Northrop. Spiritus mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1976.

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Gilman, Donald. “Artful Argumentation: A Definition of Sixteenth Century Dialogue.” In The Dialogue in Early Modern France, 1550–1630, ed. Colette Winn. Washington: Catholic University of America Press 1993. Guillén, Claudio. Entre lo uno y lo diverso; introducción a la literatura comparada. Barcelona: Editorial Critica 1985. Kahn, Victoria. “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory.” In Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1986. Krysinski, Wladimir. “Histoire littéraire et stratégies critiques de la déconstruction du texte.” In Renewals in the Theory of Literary History, ed. Eva Kushner. Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada 1984. Margolin, Jean-Claude. “Érasme et la vérité.” In Recherches érasmiennes. Genève: Droz 1969. Mollat du Jourdin, M. Voyager à la Renaissance. Actes du colloque de Tours, 1983, ed. Jean Céard and Jean-Claude Margolin. Paris: Éditions Maisonneuve et Larose 1987. Thompson, Craig R. The Colloquies of Erasmus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1965.

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18 Erasmus and the Paradox of Subjectivity

What is paradoxical about subjectivity, and how does this question relate to the thought of Erasmus? As a philosophical issue the problematic of subjectivity is very present in our time: undeniably the struggles of the postmodern self help to ignite inquiries into the early modern past of this rich and elusive concept, paradoxical or so regarded inasmuch as (according to philosophies, and often within the same philosophy) the self both is and is not its own origin. While Renaissance humanism promoted and privileged the perfecting of the human person as a cherished ideal, it did not often envisage that self as the ultimate, active source of intellectual knowledge, moral responsibility, poetic inspiration, religious enlightenment – as agency. Some of the most authoritative periodizations place the birth of modern subjectivity in Cartesianism, thus after the sixteenth century, and by way of consequence deny the possession of it to the sixteenth-century person. Without necessarily challenging this stance we can – indeed we must – presuppose a time of emergence of modern subjectivity as manifest in the life and thought of exceptional individuals. Immediately, Erasmus comes to mind. In The Order of Things Michel Foucault, portraying the sixteenthcentury episteme, makes all signs refer to an already existing, fixed, ul-

Margaret Phillips Mann Lecture, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society / Renaissance Society of America, Bloomington, Apr. 1996. Published in Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 18 (1998): 1–20.

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timately theological vision of things. The rediscovery of classical antiquity does not make a radical difference in this assessment because both Scripture and the classics refer to that known universe that speaks to human beings in nature and places them into what I call an infrasubjective posture. Foucault describes in quasi-lyrical terms the hopeless sameness that precedes the liberation of the sign. “Knowledge therefore consisted in relating one form of language to another form of language; in restoring the great, unbroken plain of words and things; in making everything speak. That is, in bringing into being … the secondary discourse of commentary. The function proper to knowledge is not seeing or demonstrating; it is interpreting” (40). Or again: “the experience of language belongs to the same archeological network as the knowledge of things and nature. To know those things was to bring to light the system of resemblances that made them close to and dependent on one another … these signs themselves were no more than a play of resemblances, and they referred back to the infinite and necessarily uncompleted task of knowing what is similar … The commentary resembles endlessly that which it is commenting upon and which it can never express” (42). The game finds its explanation, and that of its limits, in the microcosm/macrocosm relationship that obliterates a priori any individual creativity. Does the “liberation of the sign” by Descartes bring about modern subjectivity? It does if we limit subjectivity to the rational endowment of the human person, which is universal; but if we are seeking the recognition of the self also as individual agency, it is not adequate. The Order of Things is not the only work in which Foucault reflected on the premodern self. Madness and Civilization exemplifies his concern for the marginalized. Significantly, it is subtitled A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason and shows how the rational society condemns unusual human beings to oblivion as well as discipline and brutalizing. Later in his life Foucault was interviewed for and contributed an article entitled “Technologies of the Self ” to a book bearing the same title (Martin, Gutman, Hutton, 1988). He explains that he deals with obscure processes by which our societies were put in order – and that must mean processes such as those whereby the self becomes by and large Cartesian – and not very apparent processes, though they are so much a part of our landscapes that many people think they are universal. In his article Foucault surprisingly concentrates on classical “technologies of the self,” particularly on the “taking care of oneself,” which he says overtook the “know thyself” theme in the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman period. Cultivation of the self assumes a medical and ethical aspect; it gives rise to various practices that have to do with memory and with applying rules of conduct as in Stoicism, and

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gradually with self-disclosure, Stoic and Christian. In Christianity disclosure of the self moves closer and closer to renunciation of the self. This shows us the extent to which Foucault, very late in his life, was preoccupied by the premodern self. Without obliterating the imprisoned self of The Order of Things, he deepened and refined his thought regarding reflexivity in contradistinction to Christian philosophies and situations. Stephen Greenblatt, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, began by attributing a degree of autonomy to the Renaissance self but came to the conclusion that it was culturally fashioned, with a “sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of address to the world, a structure of bounded desire” (1). Although there is in the sixteenth century considerable gain for the ability “to impose a shape upon oneself,” and, more broadly, “power to control identity – that of others at least as often as one’s own” (1), there are also many losses of autonomy to church, family, state, and Greenblatt in conclusion ascertains “an increased consciousness about the self-fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process.” Self-awareness and even self-appropriation are definitely the case, but in a dialectical opposition to the power structure, so that, Greenblatt concludes, even free choices were among “possibilities whose range was strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force”(256) His analysis of More, a contemporary and close friend of Erasmus, shows how More in his texts often succeeded in situating himself outside the interplay of social and political forces. Charles Taylor in his Sources of the Self has set forth the problematics of the human self from classical antiquity through to modernity, which may even include postmodernity, with constant attention to the universal existence of frameworks enabling every individual to react consciously and responsibly to the world in an ontology of engagement of the subject. On this basis one would expect some basic empathy with the ethical substrata of Renaissance humanism, all the more since Taylor’s conception of inwardness encompasses two kinds of reflexivity, self-exploration and self-control, together with a commitment of the whole will. Taylor seldom mentions Erasmus. He recognizes the contribution to the construction of the modern self made by Montaigne, who “inaugurates a new kind of reflection, […] intensely individual, a self-exploration the aim of which is to teach self-knowledge” (181) by foiling self-delusion. But Montaigne and Descartes diverge on the road to selfhood: Montaigne stresses the “unrepeatable difference” of the individual; Descartes grounds subjectivity in universal reason, though individuals are personally responsible for thinking processes that lead them to science. Taylor almost succumbs to what he calls the demon of

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anachronism by factoring Montaigne into the lineage of modern subjectivity, but he resists the temptation and instead acknowledges that Montaigne serves as a paradigm figure to illustrate another way in which Augustinian inwardness has entered modern life, and that he helped to constitute our understanding of the modern self. Asymptotically, Foucault, Greenblatt, and Taylor – among others – agree about the subject’s not having quite materialized by the sixteenth century. Their periodization, Taylor’s especially, is dogmatic in that it allows the chronological limits of the phenomenon to decide when the phenomenon can begin – that is, in the seventeenth century. My own purpose is merely to pay close attention to the period, and the phenomenon itself, of emergence. Doing so may enable us to look in a new way at the relationship between the premodern and the postmodern self in the sense that we can hypothetically suspend the universalizing, hierachical definition of the modern self, that which, so to speak, casts the premodern self into non-existence. The centrality of our historical problem, as well as its relationship to the present, was underlined by Aram Veeser in his introduction to The New Historicism: “It has been Renaissance scholars who have evolved the fundamental themes and concerns” sometimes called New Historicism. “These have included the idea that autonomous self and texts are mere holograms, effects that intersecting institutions produce; that selves and texts are defined by their relation to hostile others (despised and feared Indians, Jews, Blacks) and disciplinary power (the King, Religion, Masculinity); that critics hoping to unlock the worship of culture should be less concerned to construct a holistic master-story of large-scale structural elements directing a whole society” – in our case the consecrated framework of modern subjectivity – “than to perform a differential analysis of the local conflicts engendered in individual authors and discourses.” (xiii) It would appear, then, that according to a number of historians and theoreticians, subjectivity develops incompletely in the sixteenth century and becomes dominant from the seventeenth to the nineteenth, and that since then shifts of meaning have occurred that demand redefinitions. Two factors are particularly important as we seek to apply these various discussions to Erasmian studies. First, the centre of gravity of the terms “subject” and “subjectivity” has shifted to denoting disciplinary entities rather than the human individual studied by the disciplines. Second, the frontiers of the subject are often not seen as coextensive with that of the single human self: “In some instances the ‘subject’ will appear to be synonymous with the ‘individual’, the ‘person’. In others – for example in psychoanalytical discourse – it will take on a more specialized meaning and refer to the unconsciously

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structured illusion of plenitude which we usually call ‘the self’. Or elsewhere, the ‘subject’ might be understood as the specifically subjected object of social and historical forces and determinations” (P. Smith, xxvii). The notion of the universal human subject has developed flaws the realization of which has been rippling through the history of culture. Sidonie Smith summarizes this strikingly: “The inaugural moment of the West’s romance with selfhood lay in the dawn of the Renaissance, during which time the notion of the individual emerged, a universal human subject who is marked individually” (5). By the mid-nineteenth century the self becomes conceptualized as a “fixed, extralinguistic” entity consciously pursuing its unique destiny. Describing this construct, J. Hillis Miller says that every self had “its own sharp configuration, different from all others. Each is present to itself and to other such spiritual entities as force, as presence” (S. Smith, 5). Furthermore, this entity projects an essentialist, elitist, and male image. The “well-defined, stable, impermeable boundaries around a single, unified and atomic core, the unequivocal delineation of inside and outside” pit these essential selves into an abstract position vis-à-vis society; they are rational, disembodied free agents, and that is the situation that will gradually be seen as marginalizing the irrational, the embodied, the different Other. The authors of the collective volume Who Comes after the Subject? simply assume that a radical change has taken place, that the history of thinking about the self has entered a different era along with the concept of being itself, to be thought of as possibility rather than essence. The volume surveys the various attacks against the subject, the “deconstruction of interiority, of self-presence, of consciousness, of mastery, of the individual or collective property of an essence … of the firmness of a seat and the certitude of an authority and a value” (Cadava et al., iv). Sylviane Agacinski cuts through much of our problematics by showing an aspect of the self-other relationship that has been left in the shadow, namely “the fact that the ‘subject’ only encounters the ‘problem’ of the other and of coexistence because it has begun by detaching itself (from the world and others) and by forgetting that it is, before anything else, in-the-world and with others” (Cadava et al., 12). Kierkegaard’s concept of subjectivity, on which Agacinski relies, does not imply that the subject is absolute source of itself but, on the contrary, that life is process, experience, and that it includes physicality, sharing with others, dependencies, weaknesses. As the self is despoiled of its absolute stronghold, the huge gap separating it from the early modern self becomes easily bridgeable. Agacinski also places the deconstruction of the metaphysics of the subject in the light of the

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Heideggerian concept of Dasein, whereby the questioning self is no longer the fiction of a consciousness without a world and without others; it has concern for others and is with them in a kind of “they,” from which freedom and responsibility has to be won. Michel Henry turns to Descartes, supposedly the founder of the monolithic modern subjectivity in which Renaissance people could not be included; he finds that Descartes simply affirms the being of the cogito, not questioning its nature, and secondly that, because of the rule of universal doubt, Descartes excludes from being everything that is represented, and the structure of representation itself, so that it is the anti-essence of representation that becomes the essence of the subject. Then, in The Passions of the Soul, Descartes shows that representation could be false but accepted as true by affectivity – the self itself, not any outside entity; and so the subject remains as the essence and defining entity of its own being (Cadava et al., 160–1). A disappointing thought, given all that has been built on the novelty and modernity of the Cartesian self. In these ways the frontiers of early modern subjectivity have been shown to be, to say the least, permeable – all the more reason to probe the period of its preparation. Erasmus is all-important in this regard, not only because of his prominence but more specifically because of the thought he gave to the human person, its potential for growth together with its subjection to God in Christ, and to the mediation of the written word among humans and between them and God through Scripture. We see the problematic of subjectivity deeply inscribed in the Erasmian corpus. It would be tempting to regard any surface sign of personal involvement in texts, displaying emotional identification with the issue at hand, as a manifestation of subjectivity; but it would also be naïve in the case of a master rhetorician who teaches others how to produce affective effects. In an attempt to overcome such naïveté I have chosen my first examples in the Colloquies, where the discourse of the “I” is shared among characters often situated at opposite ends of an issue. One of them, easily recognizable, defends the enlightened viewpoint. The opponent tries to destroy it. The opponent is by no means necessarily a villain; at times the alternative he or she presents is quite tempting. To overcome opposition Erasmus massively, and vividly, uses argumentation through dialogue; but there are times when he passionately reveals himself in a way that goes beyond the needs of the cause to be won. At those times his subjectivity is engaged in a gratuitous manner, lending force to the insistent need of the locutor’s self to be recognized. The colloquy is a wide-ranging genre where the author can also play the card of self-concealment and comment endlessly

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on the issues at hand from the respective viewpoints of the characters involved. Yet Erasmus is very present in the Colloquies, increasingly as they develop. In Puerpera Eutrapelus attempts to persuade Fabulla, and in the end persuades her, that it is important to breast-feed babies. Erasmus was not the only or the first writer to champion this cause; Aulus Gellius in Noctae Atticae (12.1), Tacitus in his Dialogus de oratoribus (28), and an essay attributed to Plutarch, De liberis educandis, had done it before him, and Vivés in De institutione feminae christianae, Elyot in The Governor, More in Utopia follow suit. Indeed, the topos is so common that it presents Erasmus with the challenge of making it more persuasive by making it more personal. Does he do so, and in what manner? In the opening discussion about men and women Erasmus champions the right of women to have the merits of maternity recognized. The author’s empathy is with Fabulla, and it is Eutrapelus whose male viewpoint is questioned. But as soon as the latter hears that Fabulla is not nursing the baby, it is she who will be under attack. For Eutrapelus, refusing to breast-feed a baby and entrusting that activity to a wet-nurse is tantamount to exposure – we might as well say to killing the child. What distinguishes Erasmus’s depiction of the plight of the baby is the physicality of his vision of it, perhaps a subconscious personal bond with a child who is abandoned; in this respect note the litanic repetition of “mother”: “An non expositionis genus est infantulum tenerum, adhuc a matre rubentem, matrem spirantem, matris opem ea voce implorantem, quae mouere dicitur et feras, tradere mulieri fortassis nec corpore salubri nec moribus integris, denique cui pluris sit pecuniae pauxillulum, quam totus infans tuus?” (Opera, 458). It is in particular Erasmus’s insistence on bodily phenomena in both mother and child, the physical basis of the emotions that are life’s first, that appear to me signs of a subjectivity willing to reveal itself, even though it needs not do so in order to win the argument. Here the question is: are such elements of pathos already present in the three classical sources? In the case of Aulus Gellius the main speaker, Favorinus, does evoke the situation of the baby deprived of its mother, but without the emotional identification we note in Erasmus’s text. Naturally, it is for the child’s sake that Favorinus wishes it to be breast-fed by its own mother; but the reasons obviously have philosophical bases: the nascent humanity of the baby, the fact that nature has ordained women to perform this function (rather than to cultivate their own beauty), that there is a close relationship between refusal to breast-feed and abortion, given the consubstantiality of the blood that has fed the fetus and the milk offered to the infant. The commanding role of nature, the sheer economy of it – the infant desires what is already provided, like attracts

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like – eloquently confirm the link of this text with aspects of the author’s diatribic philosophy; in it the infant links man to nature objectively. In Tacitus’s Dialogus de oratoribus the topos of infant again occurs in the context of the presentation of an idea – in this case the decline of eloquence – that preoccupies the author. In his own time, he feels, eloquence has declined because the level of education has declined, and that in turn is due to the disappearance of strict discipline. Formerly children of the nobility were tended by their virtuous mothers, whose manners they would observe and learn, drinking these in, so to say, with their mother’s milk. Now, Tacitus complains, infants of such families are entrusted to just any servant in the most haphazard way, and they will acquire her deplorable tastes. The unfavorable effect of the wet-nurse upon the infant is unavoidable and occurs mechanically, given their identities. Tacitus’s argumentation makes no room for the emotional state of the infant when deprived of its mother. The pseudo-Plutarch bases his argument on the natural malleability of infancy. Nature is powerful, but education can overcome nature, helped by the force of habit. Nature promotes the bonding of mother and infant by tender and affectionate feelings that do not occur when the infant is entrusted to a stranger. The treatise emphasizes the feelings of the mother, who becomes attached to her baby through the breast-feeding process, but once again the infant is completely objectivized for the purposes of the argument. Thus we see a real difference between Erasmus’s sources and his own text, in which the distress of the infant is singled out for an emotionally gripping depiction. It is not by chance that the third and longest part of the colloquy is devoted to the closeness of body and soul. Basically Eutrapelus must persuade Fabulla that the physical health of the child absolutely requires a mother’s care because body and soul are so intimately linked that the good care given to an infant will benefit the person’s eternal destiny. The Aristotelian doctrine of the soul as the soul of the body, so to say, skillfully merges with Erasmus’s fantasy of the squalling, desiring infant; this image comes back at the end of the colloquy when Eutrapelus imagines – again very physically – the child’s divided feelings vis-à-vis a mother who rejected it. In this case the impact of the physical imagination coincides with the preferred philosophical stance. A similar conjuncture can be noted in colloquies where Erasmus so vividly envisages the suffering of women in unfair marriages that he appears to project himself into their very situation through a visceral kind of pity, thereby powerfully rejoining the side of Christian compassion, to which he is also drawn from a theological perspective. In Agamos gamos sive Coniugium impar, “The Unequal

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Match,” Gabriel, who has attended the wedding of a young woman to a man much older than herself and visibly afflicted by a horrifying disease, conveys through his descriptions a gamut of feelings of disgust. Disease – the perpetual threat against the integrity of his own body – is all too familiar to Erasmus; thus the obsession with the horror of the diseased body is projected on to the body of the opponent, the torturer of the young wife, for whom forced physical contact with him is torture; and this projection lends subjective force both to the description of the torturer and to the imagined feelings of his victim. All the senses are unpleasantly affected, most particularly the sense of smell. Here is the bridegroom: “Interim prodiit nobis beatus ille sponsus, trunco naso, alteram trahens tibiam, sed minus feliciter quam solent Suiseri: manibus scabris, halitu graui, oculis languidis, capite obuincto, sanies et e naribus et ex auribus fluebat” (593). Images of extreme ugliness are not unique to Erasmus in his century; what might be unique is the manner in which the revolt of all his senses at the thought of the young bride’s fate is mobilized in the service of humaneness and against the selfish social ambitions of the bride’s parents, which are the cause of the forced marriage. He does not hesitate to resort to a sadistically necrophiliac comparison drawing on a classical reference to underscore his hatred of the bride’s enslavement: “Mihi plane videtur,” says Petronius (who is merely gaining second-hand knowledge of the bride’s situation), “hoc factum Moezentio dignum”: according to Vergil, as a supremely tyrannical and cruel method of execution, Mezentius would have living bodies tied to corpses, fastening hands to hands and mouth to mouth. But, Petronius reflects, not even Mezentius would have been savage enough to have a lovely girl yoked to a corpse. Thus hyperbole is heaped upon hyperbole in these outbursts of indignation, and the imagination is invited to picture the scene even more vividly when Gabriel challenges Petronius to imagine what pleasure the young woman will take in the monster’s caresses: “Iam tu mihi cogita, Petroni, quid voluptatis habitura sint illa suauia, illi complexus, illi nocturni lusus ac blanditiae?” The choice of literary devices, when Erasmus is strongly engaged in criticizing an evil or proposing a radical improvement, appears intimately linked with his personal sensibility. Rooted in personal experience, or “gut reaction” to the experience of others, his pity is projected upon these victims. This instinctive, very personal pity is drawn into the service of Christian compassion, so that the presence of Erasmus’s subjectivity animates the more abstract ideal he proposes. This also applies to the case of women about to enter convents – or prevented from entering convents – against their consciences. In Virgo misogamos, “The Girl with No Interest in Marriage,” Catharine is profoundly committed, against her parents’ will, to becoming a nun, a de-

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cision Eubulus is attempting to modify. In contradistinction to the obverse situation in Virgo poenitens, “The Repentant Girl” – where the two protagonists reappear under the same names but an unwilling Catharine is being forced by Catholic nuns and priests into a convent – in the former colloquy Erasmus treats mildly her attachment to an exclusively religious life, as distinct from the idea of spending that life in a specific convent. Eubulus has the task of unveiling all the secret vices of the institution. What unleashes passion in this colloquy is the relation Eubulus sees between the monastic surrender of one’s will and plain slavery. The author’s early personal experience with an unbending hierarchy animates the discourse here, though once again the person whose freedom is threatened is a woman. “Nunc,” says Eubulus, “tu te pro libera tendis vltro servam reddere. Christiana clementia maxima ex parte submouit omnem illam veterum seruitutem, nisi quod in paucis regionibus adhuc resident vestigia. At inuentum est sub praetextu religionis noum seruitutis genus. Nihil ibi licebit, nisi ex praescripto” (294–5). Does Catharine really wish to endorse a form of slavery unrelated to the will of Christ? “Si militaris seruus abiiciat vestem a domino datam, videtur abdicasse dominum; et nos applaudimus illi, qui vestem accipit, quam Christus omnium dominus non dedit; et ob hanc mutatam grauius punitur, quam si centies abiiciat vestem imperatoris ac domini sui, quae est mentis innocentia” (295). A very noticeable sign of passionate auctorial involvement here is the very length of Eubulus’s speeches in condemnation of monastic vows, concepts, and practices. The quick, Lucian-like repartee between two protagonists gives way to a lengthy plea. In Virgo poenitens the names of the two characters of Virgo misogamos resurface. In the August 1523 edition the two colloquies appear together, so that Virgo poenitens can be fairly assumed to constitute a sequel of Virgo misógamos: the same girl who wanted to enter a convent has now changed her mind, which enables the author to denounce the real villain – the order and its many helpers – as opposed to the apparent villain in the first dialogue, the girl’s parents, who wanted to save their daughter from disillusionment. Now the parents would rather she stayed in the convent. Where – if anywhere – can the author’s subjectivity manifest itself? Once again in the guise of the young woman, through her experience of loneliness and fear. Erasmus uses, as he often does, the device of the innocent observer and unwilling actor, in this case Catharine cleverly questioned by Eubulus so as to reveal the demonic behaviour of the nuns and monks. This device enables him to channel his indignation and to let it explode at the point of culmination, when a ghost, probably Satan himself, appears to the girl, engineered of course by the saintly inhabitants of the convent. They also

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arrange for the ceremony of the taking of the vows to resemble a wedding. Both dramatizations are animated lies, and Erasmus personally hates lies. It is true that here it is he who creates the fictions wrought against the girl, fictional embodiments of his anger against all the deceits that bring young people – like himself long ago – to enslave themselves to the monastic system. A treatise such as De pueris instituendis serves as another example of the manner in which a seemingly impersonal genre can at least sporadically become personal discourse and locus of subjectivity. That the treatise has multiple sources, beginning with the pseudo-Plutarch, is a matter of record, but these texts are indeed personally appropriated by Erasmus. In the Renaissance especially – as can be seen massively in Petrarchan poetry – perceptible subjective traces are often left by means of textual changes that today might seem minute yet constitute significant transformations for their time. But there is nothing minute about some of the strongest imprints of Erasmian subjectivity in this text, starting with its insistence on the tiny infant. Jean-Claude Margolin has noted the practical nature of Erasmus’s pedagogy (41). It is the practicality of personal observation rather than of devising detailed methods for teachers. Erasmus observes and studies closely the little children of his dearest friends: his godchild the son of Johann Froben, More’s daughter Meg, Henri de Bourgogne. He shows a great deal of emotion when speaking, on the one hand, of the suffering of children who are too severely punished, and, on the other, of the marvellous opportunities that fatherhood and motherhood offer in the earliest years, even months and weeks of a child’s life, to shape his or her personality with tenderness and wisdom. This motivation, which in all likelihood is nourished by memories of his own real or perceived sufferings as a little child, is also strongly correlated with his sense of the uniqueness and worth of individual persons. The depictions of the suffering of children are certainly inspired by experience: Erasmus refers to actual cases. In terms of cruelty, some of the acts he has suffered and witnessed would now be considered sadistic. Indeed, Erasmus is acquainted with the phenomenon of sadism, if not with the name that it found in the eighteenth century, when he says, for example, how many talented youths have been spiritually or physically decimated by these executioners who “ex alieno cruciatu capiant voluptatem” (2:56). Once a tutor who considered Erasmus very talented decided to strike him just to see the effect corporal punishment would have on him; this brings about illness and loss of interest in further studies. Sadistic attitudes, Margolin points out, were well known (552). Erasmus’s description of the tormentor’s face in one such incident is persuasive: its sight is more frightening than the tor-

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ture itself. The grotesque distortion of his facial features, the shrill tone of his voice, the threats he utters frighten not only Erasmus, who was present at what may well have been a routine after-dinner flogging, but the very theologian who had ordered the flogging in the first place. The victim faints and probably never completely recovers. The parallel between the episode Erasmus tells about himself and this episode, in which he is a mere witness, is striking and no doubt intentional: Erasmus wishes the reader to know that the pity he feels for young victims of corporal punishment springs from the very depths of his soul. The power of empathy extends to thoughts of happy situations as well. Obviously, the initial argumentum of the De pueris instituendis speaks in general and objective terms of the importance of giving one’s child, one’s son to be precise, the best possible education. A significant part of the text speaks of the absurdity of devoting more resources, attention, care to matters less important than the formation of one’s child. But these arguments are of a general nature. Education could still consist in simply seeing to it that children acquire virtue, manners, and the best possible ratio studii. No doubt this is part of Erasmus’ pedagogical ideal for all children, as is the principle of learning happily, with affectionate encouragement. What appears to distinguish his approach is his deeply felt concern for the personal presence of the father with the child, prior to the impending choice of the best possible tutor. To that end a whole lesson in time management is given by Erasmus to his wealthy friend. “Sufficit ad omnia munia tempus, si qua decet frugalitate dispensetur” (2:51). The day is short only when too much time is wasted on entertainment and socializing. Women (again, we see Erasmus’ sympathy for their situation) overcome many physical obstacles in order to attend to their little ones; why would a man not make time for the most important task in his life? The mutual affection that develops between parents and children, and the beneficial impact of parental presence, outweigh any fatigue that might result from spending time with one’s child. It is, as we would say today, a matter of priorities. If a Thomas More has time to be the teacher of his own children, so can anyone. It would be misguided to claim that the psychological security and comfort of the child is Erasmus’s only concern or even his chief concern. There is no doubt that the means of offering access to the best possible moral and intellectual training are the main objective of this inquiry. But that it somehow matters that the child be comfortable with this process, especially if such comfort multiplies the benefits to be attained, is in itself a characteristic and innovative feature. In other words, the child’s happiness is beginning to matter, and not just

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instrumentally. It is discussed in terms of the child’s physical well-being as a condition of intellectual development. Erasmus raises and answers a possible objection to intensive study early in a child’s life – that the child is too frail to withstand the effort – by saying that a little fatigue is a small price to pay for the spiritual benefits that will accrue later (2:52). But you also have to provide plenty of opportunity for relaxation, and avoid subjecting children to lengthy adult banquets where too much rich food is consumed – a harm much greater than an overdose of study! And here comes the most personal touch, personal because the very word “corpusculum” has been shown to be psychologically central to Erasmus on account of his anxieties regarding his own, fragile corpusculum: “Stringunt et onerant tenera corpuscula vestibus incommodis ad ostentationem” (2:53) These unworthy parents load the poor little bodies of their children with constraining and heavy clothing for the sole purpose of attracting the attention and admiration of their own peers, as if the children were monkeys in a circus, clad in human garments. What these children and these monkeys have in common is the ridiculous artificiality of their enforced costumes, which makes them into luxury toys for their parents. Erasmus bristles when he sees children disguised as little adults because this practice gravely contradicts the simplicity he desires in all things, and which he has observed in the More household (Margolin, 511). The monkeys at least serve as fictional observers of human disorders. One cannot say the same of the children. Implicitly Erasmus becomes, by dint of empathy and indignation, an early champion of the first right of children, which is the right to childhood. Once again we observe the convergence of personal involvement on the part of Erasmus with an issue that coincidentally – but by no means accidentally – draws attention to the individual needs of the human person, in this case the child. The series of parallels we have drawn so far mostly rests upon criteria of style or imagination signalling to the reader the strength of Erasmus’s feelings and, thereby, effective subjectivity. Parallels with the author’s life experience are frequently used by literary historians when they wish to show that in a given text the Renaissance author, while imitating a classical author or implementing a poetic form, speaks through that form with his or her own voice. Our endeavour consists in showing how Erasmus “clinches” the relationship between himself and the topic at hand by accumulating devices of emphasis – repetitions, isotopies, associations. Reedijk takes for granted the relationship between biography and thematic insistence in introducing a poem of Erasmus’s about feeling old, the aging process being one of the personal problems that preoccupied the humanist during his adolescence (143); or again in his

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comments upon an “Oda amatoria” that expresses Erasmus’s “sentimental friendship” for Servatius Rogerus, whose indifference tortures him and condemns him to solitude: “Testis luna meis aderat taciturna querelis, / Totusque syderum chorus” (144–5). In his reconstruction of the rhetorical context of Erasmus’s letters and poems to Servatius, Harry Vredeveld in no way minimizes the tension between rhetoric and subjectivity. They coexist, and they interact: “Rhetorical form colours, but does not necessarily exclude, sincerity and autobiographical authenticity.” This statement, if taken in isolation, would point to a heightening of expressivity determined by rhetorical form. Vredeveld bases this order of precedence on the fact that “the scholarly Erasmus could form no deep and lasting attachment except on the common ground of humanistic studies” (cwe, 85:xv). But this does not signal a lack of subjective engagement; it signals precisely the kind of engagement about which Erasmus felt most strongly in his relationships with others: we are dealing with the subjectivity of someone for whom friendship and the sharing of literary experience are inextricably intertwined, and who excels at constructing his self according to the very dictates of that self, in this case the direction of love through and of literature. Such love could not be devoid of emotion, quite the contrary, but it would substitute itself for forms of love and friendship more common among young people. Subjectivity is present not despite but through that exceptional situation. The poems adressed to Servatius are rhetorically oriented towards eliciting greater affection. For example, “Elegia Erasmi de collatione doloris et leticiae” claims that the sharing of joy prolongs youth and stimulates the mind. Obviously, Erasmus demands reciprocity of emotional as well as intellectual commitment. He will eventually turn away from Servatius to form new friendships, thus carrying out in real life the threat contained in the “Oda amatoria.” The rhetorically constructed and the living self form a paradoxical whole: the rhetorician encapsulates his emotion in the text, thereby controlling it, but the reader can perceive the emotional reverberation as added proof of authenticity, beyond that which the rhetorician intended or thought necessary. In later years Erasmus’s poems would continue to evolve in the direction of his personal interests – that is, towards moral and sacred themes. No poem shows the relationship of rhetoric and subjectivity better than the “Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami carmen ad Copum Basileiensem de senectutis incommodis, heroico carmine et iambico dimetro catelectico.” It could have been a pure exercise in rhetoric as well as in poetic skill, with its dramatization of the carpe diem theme, its precise observations on the decay of the human body, its nostalgic call

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for the time of youth to flow more slowly. But the poem becomes strongly personalized by the introduction of what amounts to an autobiographical confession describing Erasmus’s successive activities and passions until the age of forty (cwe, 85:16–18); and this in turn becomes the basis of a pledge to devote henceforth every moment, every thought to Christ. Once again the subjective and the rhetorical coalesce; or, to put it in more contemporary terms, the referent of the subject gains an intradiagetic status. Many texts show that Erasmus was deeply aware of the diversity among human beings and of the depths of their individuality. In De pueris instituendis he draws attention to the diversity of intellectual gifts and artistic predispositions. A child can resist grammar but be gifted in music or arithmetic, and so on: “In eo quidque valet ad quod natura compositum est” (2:73). Every being’s strength lies in the aptitudes given to it by nature. Certainly the educator is to take advantage of this individuality in imparting knowledge and fashioning the person. But is that all? The educative process could still be a means to an end that would be a levelling one for all human beings, such as the monastic discipline, which tended to suppress the self as self. That the philosophy of Christ requires, on the contrary, the uttermost cultivation of the self as offering is clearly shown in the Enchiridion. This is all the more significant since, according to James McConica, the Enchiridion is “the epitome of doctrine and exhortation combined,” much more a guide to living than an educational treatise in any sense (51). There is no doubt that it deals, metaphorically at least, with Christian obedience and discipline, ultimately intended to free every soul so that it may unite with Christ. But does liberation in Christ mean liberation from self? Emphasizing the centrality of Christ, Erasmus sees human institutions grouped in concentric circles around Him, the papacy and clergy being the closest. Spiritually, however, all human beings are engaged in the struggle for the survival of their souls against the same material constraints. At this point it would be easy to attribute to Erasmus a doctrine of the self still close to the “universe of resemblance” of which Foucault speaks from an epistemological viewpoint, since the good Christian soldier seems to be called upon to divest himself of all that is selfcentred, that relates to his physical and emotional difference. Yet gradually the reader begins to understand not only that such a simplistic dualism is not the case in Erasmus’s view but that the whole self, according to him, is absolutely involved in the redemptive process. Again, diversity of persons is stressed. Some minds are limited to literal interpretation of Scripture; some might even benefit by the mechanical repetition of words in their presence; while others who

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have “good mental abilities” are able on their own to reach the deepest spiritual meanings (Enchiridion, 36). All this is good Pauline theology, but where is the Erasmian differential? Theologically, the reversal of wisdom and folly is also a Pauline concept; so is even that of the power of the most personal prayer, although it is reinterpreted here against the backdrop of the danger of impersonal, institutional, collective prayer in the Church. Together, the exhortations to self-knowledge and to a spirituality in which prayer and the understanding of Scripture are conceived in full awareness of the specific nature of one’s individuality and its needs bear witness to the manner in which Erasmus synthesizes humanistic cultivation of the self with Christian surrender. For without that exploration of the self the surrender would be less meaningful, perhaps meaningless. Again, we must observe the presence of the division, by then traditional, between the inner and outer in the post-lapsarian human being, whose heart is a “turbulent republic” (42). Erasmus follows Plato in ascribing domination to reason over emotion and passion. But he adopts the Aristotelian view that the passions should be subdued rather than eradicated, which again signals a greater recognition of personality. Indeed, he goes on to develop at length the topic of individual variation among personalities, particularly when it comes to the control of emotion and passion. He develops, somewhat stereotypically, the topic of differences between genders and among peoples and even touches upon the problem of criminal disposition. True, some of the variations he mentions rest upon the four traditional temperaments as determined by the four humours; but these become sets of factors among others that make up the person. What really constitutes the person is the will to survive spiritually: “A very important part of Christianity is to want to be a Christian with all one’s heart and soul” (46). There is no denial here of the demands of transcendence. What is affirmed is that the co-operation of the will matters supremely. What Erasmus finds in both Aristotle and Origen is a soul that experiences sensations, emotions, and feelings and can thus act as intermediary between the spiritual, which is divine, and the physical, which is inclined to sin. “The soul,” says Erasmus, “constitutes us as human beings” (52). Moreover, it animates the will in the freedom of its choices. “In expanding these views,” says Augustijn, “Erasmus feels himself to be the defender of the true freedom that Christ brought and protected against the Pharisees, the freedom Paul championed against the Judaizers” (48). The novelty of his thought in this respect is that he obstinately adapts his doctrine to real human beings. Does he apply it to his own perception of himself? Among a multitude of examples that could be quoted here let us take two from the

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correspondence to show that personal feelings are not only expressed; they are featured. In the 1487–88 letters to Servatius Rogerus, Erasmus humbles himself in adoration before the addressee. Could his expression of a disappointed youthful friendship, even a crush, be mere hyperbolic flattery of a kind not unknown among his contemporaries? Or did he really experience feelings of unworthiness when his friend’s attention was withdrawn from him? All we are ever given is representation of the self, which in this case reveals a high degree of vulnerability. Or again, we could examine the letter describing to Thomas More his discussion with Egmondanus in the presence of the rector, and more particularly his anger when insulted and the technique he used to keep his temper and “intemperate language” under control. Surely, in considering anger we touch part of Erasmus’s subjective identity, and are led to think that the Enchiridion rule concerning it has a personal base. These readings of stylistic symptoms of the self could amount to sheer methodological speculation were it not for the fact that Erasmus enunciated a correlated principle elsewhere – in Ciceronianus, where Bulephorus sees eloquence, when unadulterated by inconsiderate imitation, flowing from a “pectus opulenter instructum varia rerum omnium cognitione.” Such speech is the person: “ex intimis enim vaenis, non in cute nascitur.” The self can be apprehended in the speaker’s language. It can also be subverted, suppressed, denied. But the point, to which Terence Cave has drawn attention, is that here, before Descartes, the subjective self is the source of utterance, though of course it has also assimilated the language of many others (37–38, 45; cf Maxwell). Thus, without claiming “modern subjectivity” for Erasmus, we can certainly state that he has paved the way for it in these various converging modes of representing the human person as source. What is the status of this claim? It would be inexact to say that Erasmus’s emotional emphases are, even at their sourcce, merely spontaneous or impulsive. In theory and practice Erasmus champions rhetorical control. Recent scholarship shows him ordaining his European image with energy and foresight in ways unprecedented among writers, and this makes the hypothesis of spontaneity even less likely, while at the same time it adds, in my view, to the historical evidence of an insistently self-aware commanding personality: “comparatively late in Erasmus’s life, his reputation as translator, editor, and pedagogic theorist was consolidated into a solid international reputation as the figure of trans-European learning, the quintessential European man of letters. This extraordinary rise to prominence was effected by Erasmus himself, and the tightly knit coterie of scholar-servants, editors, correctors, printers and publishers, by a combination of more-or-less conscious strategies” (Jardine, 147). The adverbial phrase “more-or-less” signals

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that in Lisa Jardine’s eyes the case is not closed, that even in the process of self-institutionalization – and perhaps especially in that process – Erasmus may be at least partly driven by motivations that today would be considered subconscious, and that the process therefore manifests a subjectivity attempting to gain control of itself and others. At that point, is the Christian soldier in control? And similarly, what about control of/in Erasmian writing? The avowed rhetorical control of the text belies subjectivity yet occasionally permits the uncontrollable to be a control, and the reader must decide on the final proportions of “art” and “nature” in a given text. Jardine describes Erasmus’s mode of presentation of Jerome’s letters as a balancing act between showing emotion and control of it: “once we recognize the strategic care with which the successive volumes of Erasmus’s own Epistolae were put together, we have to abandon the idea that they represent the ‘real’ Erasmus … Instead, we uncover an extraordinary resource of a different kind for our understanding of how thoroughly and inventively Erasmus constructed the emerging Northern humanist ‘world of learning’: one which at the same time as being seductively vivid and emotionally charged is as carefully controlled and programmed as the Metsys panel or Holbein painting, and as carefully conceived as a fitting public testimony to lasting greatness in a grand tradition” (148). We are dealing, and have been dealing all along, not with the “real” Erasmus but the textualized Erasmus, and the manner in which his passion is inscribed in the text. That such questioning can occur bears witness to the fact that, like Montaigne, in becoming consubstantial with the text, Erasmus willed that his passions, his life, be communicated to the reader and thus survive. Could it be that in so doing Erasmus provides a space for and a model of the emergence of early modern subjectivity?

works cited Augustijn, Cornelis. Erasmus: His Life, Works and Influence. Trans. J.C. Grayson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1991. Cadava, Eduardo, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Who Comes after the Subject? New York: Routledge 1991. Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1979. Chomarat, Jacques, André Godin, and Jean-Claude Margolin. Actes du colloque international Erasme. Geneva: Droz 1990. Erasmus, Desiderius. Spiritualia: Enchiridion, De contemptu mundi, De vidua christiana. Vol. 66 of The Collected Works of Erasmus. Ed. John W. O’Malley, trans. Charles Fantazzi et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.

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– Opera omnia: recognita et adnotatione critica instructa notisque illustrata. 9 vols. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing 1967. Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les Choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard 1966. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1980. Jardine, Lisa. Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993. Margolin, Jean-Claude, ed. Erasme: Declamatio de pueris statim ac literaliter instituendis. Geneva: Droz 1966. Martin, Luther H., Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Technologies of the Self: Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachussets Press 1988. McConica, James. Erasmus. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991. Maxwell, Mary Ann. ‹Speak that I may see you’: Concealment and Unconcealment in the Colloquia of Erasmus, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, and Sidney’s New Arcadia.” PhD, University of Toronto, 1993. Reedijk, Cornelis, ed. The Poems of Desiderius Erasmus. Leiden: E.J. Brill 1956. Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. Veeser, Aram ed. The New Historicism. New York: Routledge 1989.

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19 In Search of the Obverse Side of Petrarchism

The search I wish to describe is not directed, as the title might suggest, towards the anti-Petrarchan tradition, which has been a rich source of obverse images of the idealized Other – usually woman – so characteristic of Petrarchism itself. Where Petrarch and his followers idealize and even worship, anti-Petrarchism levels, satirizes, and ridicules. Where Petrarch and his followers create a myth, anti-Petrarchism demythologizes and demystifies. It is a trend that its idealistic counterpart almost seems to demand, and their duality seems omnipresent in European literature as part of the even more basic duality between idealistic and realistic traditions from classical times through the Middle Ages and from then on. During the Renaissance the same poet often writes in both veins: Jodelle composes both Amours and Contr’amours. Du Bellay in his Olive (1549, second edition 1550) very temporarily espouses the Petrarchan trend in love poetry that other Pléiade poets, including Ronsard, Baïf, and Tyard, also explore. Within two years, however, he will write: “J’ai oublié l’art de pétrarquizer,” and somewhat later, in the Regretz (1558), he will show with deliciously Bernesque irony a travesty of womanly beauty in his portrayal of aging prostitutes. Ronsard himself writes the pornographic Folastries more or less at the same time as his “style haut” poetry in praise of Cassandre.

Invited conference paper, then chapter in Images of Women in the Arts, ed. Vera Adamantova and Madeline Lennon (London: Studies in Modern Languages at Western, ser. 1, 1991), 5–20.

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In cultivating two manners of writing so opposed to each other, these poets were, unconsciously in all likelihood, making a statement that sets the stage for our inquiry, namely that, as part of the awakening of vernacular literatures, they were concerned with developing forms and styles. As literary exercises both Petrarchism and antiPetrarchism provided stylistic models; the latter would challenge and carnivalize the excesses of the former. But I would venture to say that for that very reason anti-Petrarchan spoofs are very reminiscent of the model against which they react, and belong to the same locked horizon – at least, a horizon from which we are excluded unless we are able to see beyond the easy interplay of opposites. In other words, antiPetrarchism, though it does show that writers and readers were questioning the persistent idealization of woman, is a symptom, perhaps an antidote, but not a historical explanation of the Petrarchan phenomenon, not even a partial one. I would suggest that it is not by itself the obverse side of Petrarchism, which has to be sought more indirectly and in greater depth, and that despite the historical distance that separates us from the Renaissance, there is something to be learned from probing and deconstructing the Petrarchan phenomenon. The real subject is perhaps the nature of history, and how to try to understand the massive literary trend that Petrarchism was throughout Europe: not by listening to the dominant voice that endorses the most obvious and apparent features of the phenomenon and painstakingly records all the imitations of Petrarch and their modalities, in one European country after another and through several generations of poets, but by attempting to demystify the phenomenon and bring within hearing voices that might have been displaced or silenced by it. What explains the generalized adoption of the image of the perfectly beautiful, untouchable, and unyielding lady who torments her obsessed lover by her virtue and reduces him to psychological subjection? Obviously there is a discourse here that attributes domination to the woman, to the point where certain medieval courtly poems called her Lord. What is it that remains unsaid but implied in this type of discourse? It would be tempting to look for one simple overall answer to these questions, one, for example, that would show that courtly and, later, Petrarchan trends overcompensated for the actual status of women, much less exalted than the lyrical poems implied, the less so as one descends the social and economic scale. The idealized image of woman may have served as a foil. Another worthwhile exploration would consist in applying to the Petrarchan phenomenon the results of current research on love-sickness in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (particularly on Jacques Ferrand), and in bringing to light the relationship between symptoms filtered by the poetic imagination and the descriptions con-

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tained in the medical literature of the time, which acknowledges persistent unrequited love as a physical disease. Or again, we could go along with Marxist criticism and some of its perceptions of the melancholy state of mind of aristocratic, or at least aristocratically minded poets as the sign of their social restlessness and isolation at the very time when bourgeois society was in a state of energetic development. In all three cases Petrarchism would be explained away as a reaction of compensation for existing evils. I would not totally discard any of these avenues of research and eventually interpretation, since the mechanisms they seek to unveil may well have coexisted and combined, but I would wish to seek out textual evidence for such contextual observations and particularly to see how, in the text, Petrarch himself and the Petrarchan poets deal with the Other that is woman, and substitute their voices for hers. A useful sub-inquiry would concern itself with Petrarchan poets who were women – for instance, Vittoria Colonna, Louise Labé, Pernette du Guillet – and the manner in which they speak to their male lovers in Petrarchan terms. Was it a way of asserting their otherness or of further compromising it? One suspects the latter (see Rigolot). Returning to the male Petrarchan lover, and leaving entirely aside the question of sincerity, of personal involvement or non-involvement in the poem, and even of intentionality, let us examine the constraints the Petrarchan code places upon the imagined presence and character of the Other, the woman in the poem. There are certainly textual commitments (though they have often been dubbed lip-service) to the reality of that Other. The mimetic convention requires the poet to provide lively details that produce an “effet de réel.” Laura, and her many incarnations in the poetry that issues from the Rime sparse, definitely has a biography, though it may be fictional. This biography abounds in small details so realistic that they tend to persuade the historian or critic that the poet’s beloved must have existed. I myself have written dozens of pages on the presumed or assumed reality of Pasithée, who was loved by Pontus de Tyard, and all and any details concerning her, including her ability to sing and play music and the inevitable presence of jealous opponents in the city of Mâcon. It takes some time to realize that the mimetic effect is also part of a convention within a tradition, so that these presumed identification tags do not substantially affect the sameness of the global image of women in Petrarchan poetry, and in fact drive us further away from the recognition of their individuality and otherness. Whether it is the loss of Laura’s glove, which bares her hand; or a piece of embroidery donated by her (Poem 99), or Petrarch’s quarrels and reconciliations with a Laura (Poem 201) who is sometimes angry, at other times lenient,

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such features function as very common accretions to the model in the poetry of Petrarch’s followers; they are therefore not automatically keys to unlocking the mystery of individuality. Petrarch’s Rime sparse and the immense tradition flowing from this book written in praise of Laura were so pivotal because they began to function as a model. By this I do not mean only a model in the imitative sense, although few books have generated such a rich and precise wave of translations, versions, adaptations, transformations, phenomena that in their own right signal an appeal to the poetic imagination that perhaps has not been consistently pointed out. I mean that the model in the literary sense is almost the result, rather than the source, of the model as explanatory construct. The Rime sparse are a model in both senses, and this quality in turn relates to literature as conscious symbolization of human attitudes. The literary model may well function as a behavioural model and – who knows? – the reverse might also be true. Literary historians of Petrarch, and those of his followers of other generations of Italian and other European writers, have speculated massively about the identity of Laura and some even about her very existence. This is not at stake here; we should, however, observe that the existence/inexistence question also arises in the case of several of Petrarch’s literary followers. Since the discussion takes place among scholars who work on different literatures and in many cases have no contact with one another, it is worth noting that the existence of the beloved woman is customarily or at least frequently problematic. Why does this matter today? Because the thesis of the historical inexistence of the lady, as opposed to her demonstrable historical existence, adds to the likelihood that the highly idealized and stylized woman of the Canzoniere is primarily a matter of formal choice. This does not mean that formal choice precludes commitment to certain personal attitudes. On the contrary, formal choices embody attitudes; the only difference that Laura’s existence or inexistence made is forever buried in Petrarch’s private life. The overwhelming fact is that the form he created has carried throughout the Renaissance and beyond, and in the literature of many countries, an image of woman – and more generally of the beloved – that by its monolithic splendour fails to let the reader recognize the reality of the Other. Not that poetry should be narrowly mimetic; while the absence of a referent is impossible, it does not have to attach itself blindly to that referent. But the denial of the referent is the other extreme. The referent to which the Rime sparse point tends to be a refraction of the poet’s self rather than that of the person he so passionately – and so fictively – seeks. In the Rime sparse there are many signs of this self-seeking, to which I am attaching no moral valuation but rather a psychological one. Let us

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single out three well-known themes that reflect the depersonalizing of Laura: the theme of death, that of spiritual salvation, and that of “glory.” With respect to Laura’s death there exists a testimony of Petrarch’s grasp of the event. The document in question is not a poem but nevertheless a text, a set of notations that we should carefully analyse for the purposes of our inquiry, on the flyleaf of Petrarch’s copy of Virgil: “Laura, illustrious through her virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April in the church of Ste. Claire in Avignon, at matins; and in the same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same hour, but in the year 1348, the light of her life was withdrawn from the light of day, while I, as it chanced, was in Verona, unaware of my fate” (quoted in Wilkins, 77). It should be noted that in relating the death of the person with whom he was so thoroughly obsessed in poetry, Petrarch pauses to consider the coincidence in dates between their first meeting and the date of Laura’s death, as if the meeting were a prefiguration and the death somehow a consequence. This sense of coincidence is normally interpreted as signifying, on the part of Petrarch and Petrarchan poets, a sense of the fulfilment of fate, but such interpretations follow Petrarch’s own and therefore do not question the reduction, so patent in the document quoted above, of Laura’s life to a set of numerical relations. “I am persuaded,” Petrarch continues, “that her soul returned to the heaven from which it came […] I have thought to write this, in bitter memory, yet with a certain bitter sweetness […] so that I may be admonished, by the sight of these words and by the consideration of the swift flight of time, that there is nothing in this life in which I should find pleasure; and that it is time, now that the strongest tie is broken, to flee from Babylon; and this, by the prevenient grace of God, should be easy for me, if I meditate deeply and manfully on the futile cares, the empty hopes, and the unforeseen events of my past years” (quoted in Wilkins, 77). It is clear that the death of Laura is grasped as an admonishment, an opportunity to understand the fleetingness of earthly satisfactions and to learn how to cling to more spiritual realities. Laura’s death is a learning opportunity; it is the tool of the poet’s salvation; and she is also his guide in the discovery of his own death: “Death cannot make her sweet face bitter, but her sweet face can make Death sweet; what need is there of any other guide for my dying? She guides me, from whom I learn every good” (Poem 358). Thus, after the death of Laura, whose “sweet face can make death sweet,” we see in retrospect that the living death the poet undergoes because of the suffering to which Laura, still living, subjects him is the beginning of an apprenticeship leading to the victory of the spirit over death.

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Many poems suggest that there is continuity in the life and death of Laura because both in different ways lead the poet towards beginning to choose eternity. I would not go so far as to say that Petrarch implies Laura was created almost solely to be his guide towards eternity, and yet a stanza such as this suggests such an attitude: “Every day seems to me more than a thousand years, until I may follow my faithful, dear guide who led me in the world and now leads me by a better way to a life without troubles” (Poem 357). Without asserting that this is Laura’s principal function, the poem crystallizes her in that function, casting a bright light upon it and thereby obscuring if not eliminating from the reader’s horizon that which Laura was or might have been in life and death, apart from the poet’s exalted perception of her as the angel of his salvation. One must admit that in order that this poetic teleology may come into play, the poet also has to transform himself into a poetical subject, the lyrical self whose life is totally consonant with that of Laura: “From then on I have never lived a day; I was with her in life, and with her I have reached the end, and I have completed my day with her steps” (Poem 358). But surely the coinciding of the two poetic personalities is part of the same reduction that whittles down the otherness of Laura in the eyes of Petrarch. Later yet the figure of the Virgin Mary replaces that of Laura, or rather, the image of Laura becomes expanded and further spiritualized by this ultimate sublimation. To the Virgin he confides his continual suffering and prays for the expansion of his love from a mortal to an immortal object – the Virgin herself: “for if I am wont to love with such marvellous faith a bit of deciduous mortal dust, how will I love you, a noble thing?” (Poem 366) (“ché se poca mortal terra caduca / amar con si mirabil fede soglio, / che devrò far di te, cosa gentile?”). The point is not whether Petrarch should have felt this way, nor whether, indeed, this kind of religious transfiguration of lost love is not always objectification of the lost earthly person, but the nature of the stylistic indicator of this process here. Laura is now “poca mortal terra caduca,” and this implies an ultimate reduction of the otherness of the other person, in that she is totally annihilated in the ontological change that dissolves her existence and the memory of her existence into the undifferentiated spirituality of the eternal. This is, in a way, a second death, at the hands of the poet this time, a death in a sense more definitive since he wills it to be so by his philosophical decision. It may be a bold statement to say that this kind of religious consolation is often, in times of bereavement, a ritual killing of the Other, but I am not really saying that; instead I am tracking, in the case of Petrarch and Petrarchism, signs of poetic reductions of the other person,

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which relate to other signs and complete the aesthetic image, not the referent of that image in the life of Petrarch. It must be admitted, however, that it is this set of signs that was widely transmitted and has created in Western poetic imagination this complicity between the tendency to idealize and the tendency to bypass, reduce, silence; but to make this admission is also to make a certain judgment upon the nature of the poetic vision. In the process, death – the end of material life – also becomes a set of signs and as such is annexed to the modes of expression of the unhappy consciousness, of the sense of inconstancy that will accompany literature far into mannerism and into what some scholars have defined as the literary baroque. A poem such as 272 exemplifies this pact between the poet and death, a pact so strong that there is a very real sense in which Laura had to die, just as Isolde in the Tristram legend had to die, according to Denis de Rougemont, to bring to completion the Western myth of passion, and just as the death of Eurydice, in the myth of Orpheus, is no accidental death but the fulfilment of a deathwish brought about by his destructively seeking his own image in and through the object of his passion. “Life flees and does not stop an hour, and death comes after by great stages; and present and past things make war on me, and future things also; and remembering and expecting both weigh down my heart now on this side, now on that, so that in truth, except that I take pity on myself, I would already be beyond these thoughts” (Poem 272). The anxious balancing between metaphorical life and metaphorical death is a perfect example of the Petrarchan habit of using antithesis as the structuring device of a poem, corroborated by conceits. It is remarkable that the balancing and the uncertainties are attributed, always, to the poet who sees himself as dominated and victimized by the lady, perceived as the aggressor. The self-pity that arises in this poem is a rare occurrence; most of the time suffering is accepted as the very condition of love, and the self-pity that the poet experiences here will not heal but only serve to prolong his pain and his capacity to experience it. Another theme, and therefore another set of signs, is closely linked to that of the poet’s redemption by Laura’s death: it is throughout the book, that is, in relation to Laura both alive and dead, the theme of love as apprenticeship of suffering and therefore as redemptive process: I saw on earth angelic qualities and heavenly beauties unique in the world, so that the memory pleases and pains me, for whatever I look on seems dreams, shadows and smoke. And I saw those two beautiful lights weeping that have a

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thousand times made the sun envious; and I heard amid sighs words that would make mountains move and rivers stand still. Love, wisdom, worth, piety, and sorrow made, weeping, a sweeter music than any other heard in the world, and the heavens were so intent upon the harmony that no leaf on any branch was seen to move, so much sweetness filled the air and the wind. (Poem 156)

Inasmuch as Laura is identified with beauty, and that beauty with cosmic harmony, contemplating her impels the poet towards spiritual reality. Everyday reality recedes to the status of “dreams, shadows and smoke.” This aspect of the Petrarchan vision seems to empower Laura to lift the poet above that reality. It is clear once again, however, that his dualistic vision is projected on to the image of Laura. Her personal beauty expands as it joins in the universal harmony, but it is also thereby depersonalized and silenced, and the last stanza, which is meant to be infinitely euphoric, could be interpreted as dysphoric because of this silencing. Certain questions could, of course, be raised with respect to any poetry, not only Petrarchan poetry, concerning the effect of endowing the expression of feelings with aesthetic form. But aesthetic form is not automatically a cause of failure to communicate; it is in fact designed to communicate in a specific way. The precise question here is whether Laura’s loss of identity in the cosmic harmony rejoins or obfuscates her reality as the Other. At the very least it propels her further and further away towards the unattainable. Moreover, it has to do so if the poet is to advance on the road to spirituality, and so the increasing harshness of Laura, often even more frighteningly portrayed in the poetry of Petrarch’s followers, complicates and slows down the learning process until we begin to see a reversal: the lady must be harsh in order that the poet may learn more and more profoundly, and thus, in the end, be saved. Could it be that it is the lady who is imprisoned in her harshness by definition? The very repetitiveness of the assaults upon the poet’s wounded self signals dilatio, a poetic necessity that it be so, that the cycle never end, that Laura or some other lady continue in life and even death as persecutor of the poet’s love and – let us say it – of his ego. All this is well exemplified in Poem 161, where a series of interpellations introduced by the cry “O” in Italian, and happily preserved as “O” in the English translation we have used, results in an elliptical network binding together the poet’s many woes, which are pitted against the beauty of the lady’s face, whence all these sources of pain proceed: “O scattered steps, O yearning, ready thoughts, O tenacious memory, O savage ardor, O powerful desire, O feeble heart, O my eyes, not eyes but fountains, O leaves, the honour of famous brows, O sole ensign of

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the twin deservings, O laborious life, O sweet error which makes me go seeking across shores and mountains”; and, after all this, Laura’s face alone in the first three-line stanza, but in the second, a most revealing closure that contains an appeal to potential readers: “O noble loving souls, if there are any in the world, and you, naked shades and dust; ah, stay, to see what my suffering is.” The resolution of the tension between persecutor and persecuted is an appeal to witnesses, lending credence to my assumption that persecution is indeed part of the network that the poet’s ego weaves around itself and needs to have made more real, and stronger, by the gaze of others. This does not abolish the theme of learning through suffering, but it means that the learning process is rendered much more complex by the poet’s drawing attention so insistently to the discourse of the self. Historians such as Genot and Tripet have drawn attention to this discourse of the self and to the manner in which Petrarch, the person, identifies with it. Given his personality, it was normal for him to draw to himself, into himself, all the benefits of love and of its prolonged distress. What we are really probing here is the reason for the adoption of this attitude by so many poets of so many countries for generations after Petrarch. The isolated though infinitely prestigious case of Petrarch himself could possibly be thought to represent him exclusively, to be solipsistic and separate from social realities, a monument of his time. But the extraordinary wave of imitations that ensued indicates that this is not so, though literary historians have not yet really gone to the roots of the phenomenon. The most frequent explanation is that poets were told to imitate ancient and foreign, especially Italian poets – and most especially Petrarch, because of his undoubted excellence and prestige – so as to enrich their vernacular literatures. This is typically the case in du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, with the consequent wave of Petrarchan imitation in the love poetry of Pléiade poets around 1550. Yet this explanation only pushes back the frontiers of the problem without solving it, since the imitator is free to choose whom to imitate and, among his works, what to imitate. And it particularly does not tell us why, among the works of Petrarch himself, the Rime sparse generated so many more imitations than even the Triunfi, or the Secretum. Nor does it explain why the obsessiveness, the idealization, the anxiety about the self, the representation of woman as a beautiful object, and the sense of adoration that exalts but also petrifies her have continued to inhabit the Petrarchan model. The themes, the style, the imagery, the entire poetics of the song collection, all these have a staying power that few works have possessed in the history of literature. Let us face it: there must have been a psycho-historical conjuncture associated with male dominance and its exigencies, but in

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such a way that the poetic mirror refracts the contrary image, so that the guilt is transferred to woman. For example, in her double role as temptress and agent of salvation woman should be spurned as the former, praised and courted as the latter. Yet the poet usually takes upon himself the guilt of entertaining temptation; even though he admires the lady for her virtue, he also records his unhappiness about it. This, then, in a kind of semiotic inversion, could mean that men normally tempt women and that a woman’s hard-earned victory, over herself and her lover, if it happens that their union is in some way socially or spiritually impossible, inspires guilt in her so that he can credit himself with the victory and project his pride on to an image of woman that has lost its own will. There is, in fact, a sonnet of Petrarch’s where all this is made explicit in a way congruent with our analysis (but, if every sonnet were so explicit, we would have no “obverse side” left to uncover!): “Love, I trangress and I see my transgression, but I act like a man who burns with a fire in his breast; for the pain still grows, and my reason fails and is almost overcome by my suffering […] Therefore if my soul hazards herself beyond her usual style, you are doing it – who so inflame and spur her that she attempts every difficult way towards her salvation – and even more those heavenly rare gifts which my lady has. Now at least make her perceive it, and make her pardon herself for my transgression” (Poem 236). Thus, even in recognizing that woman will take on more than her share of guilt, Petrarch seeks to involve her poetic image in his own self-analysis. A third theme, or set of signs, also converges towards reshaping the image of woman into that willed or needed by the male lover’s ego: that of glory. This Horatian preoccupation underlies many a love song, but often emerges into full view and subverts the language of love itself because the attraction of wordly glory outbalances the glory and the attraction of loving and hoping to be loved. In poem 203, one of those in which Petrarch avowedly seeks to soften Laura’s heart, he is also avowedly listening to his own song and planning its effect on future audiences: “This ardor of mine, which matters so little to you, and your praises in my well-known rhymes, could perhaps yet inflame thousands.” Explicitly this is the way the poet compensates for his own unhappiness. The song will bring him a measure of happiness, and to Laura, regret as well as overdue admiration for him. But what is implied, to the point where I think this is a hypogram of the poem and perhaps of the book, is that the song matters ever so much more than Laura, and, perhaps, than her poet. This is also relevant to the interrelatedness between Petrarch’s poetry and the Platonic vision of beauty inherent in the poetry of many of Pe-

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trarch’s continental followers. Does the idea according to which the love of the concrete person is but a a means towards the contemplation of beauty itself and, through a continuous process of spiritualization, that of the supreme Good also serve to express and to elevate that concrete person to the same level of spirituality as her lover; or is pursuit of the intangible somehow depersonalizing? Adoration can be, as it is in the first few sonnets of Pontus de Tyard’s Erreurs amoureuses, a sophisticated form of possession but one in which the possessed has, once again, no say, and which disallows reciprocity. Boscán is an exception here because of his acceptance of self-denial, even self-annihilation, as a response to the impossibility of love. But that is another extreme choice of the male ego rather than a renunciation of its exclusive vision. The many writings that, in the sixteenth century, extol the superiority of women over men reverse the problem mechanically rather than constitute a true recognition of difference. All we can say is that in the Petrarchan model the lyrical subject tends to fashion the beloved torturer in ways that serve his hidden needs and eradicate her difference as the truly Other. It might be objected that in Petrarch’s own time and for some time to come the perception of individuality – one’s own and that of the other person – would at any rate be problematic. This would indeed account for the manner in which the lyrical subject projects himself into the image of the lady, but not for the specific nature of the projection, particularly as regards the persistent instrumentality of the lady’s role.

works cited Ferrand, Jacques. A Treatise on Love. Ed. and trans. Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1990. Petrarca, Francesco. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrical Poems. Ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1976. Rigolot, François. “Gender vs. Sex Difference in Louise Labé’s Grammar of Love.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986. 287–98. de Rougemont, Denis. L’Amour et l’Occident. Paris: Plon 1939. Wilkins, E.H. Life of Petrarch. Chicago: Chicago University Press 1939.

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20 Imagining the Renaissance Child

To this vast subject I shall not attempt to bring answers but merely to raise questions and to devise, only programmatically, a conceptual framework. Many of the recent findings of social history contradict certain admittedly naïve expectations regarding the accomplishments of the Renaissance. Simplistically one might say that there has been a gap between theoretical visions of the Renaissance and its practices. I suspect there is much more to be said, and that pursuing the discrepancies is a necessary part of rewriting and rereading the Renaissance so as to uproot, destabilize, complexify our images of Renaissance children both in concept and in reality. At one extreme lies the idea that the Renaissance, in linear progression, transformed the child from being the proverbial miniature adult to being a full-blooded person growing into adulthood in a combination of discipline and happiness. At the other extreme – well, there are in fact several extremes, of which one would consist in denying that it was the Renaissance rather than previous or subsequent ages that accomplished this, and another in pointing to historical phenomena such as infant mortality, infanticide, child labour in various forms, great social inequality institutionalizing poverty, and many others, indicating that the secure, welleducated, civilized, handsome little person was an exception or even a dream. Another extreme yet would consist in saying that the linear

Plenary lecture, Sixteenth-Century Conference, Washington University, Oct. 1996.

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progression was mostly restricted to Italy, mostly to upper classes, or mostly to the abstract level of pedagogical writing; the Renaissance model would exist, but by and large unrealized. In the process of rewriting the Renaissance we have learned to distrust linear progression; to favour specific, concrete sectorial research; to expect and welcome heterogeneity, so that if I say that our object takes shape in the process of contradiction among all these extremes, that it emerges not as a unified process but as a series of discrete, discontinuous emergences, including even regressions, and that its geography and periodization both are disparate, I could be by the same token describing other areas of study, such as the emergence of the scientific revolution or that of modern subjectivity. The child we are trying to imagine is anything but a unified model. Nor is it true that literature and art idealize it while history, especially social history, constructs what has been the case, and while pedagogical theory tries to bridge the gap between the live creature with all its determinants and the person that ought to be in response to the prevailing social, ethical, and theological values. If that is so, will any generalization be possible? I believe it will be, as long as we keep in mind the concept of emergence and its inherent spottiness. Broadly, three kinds of corpora or areas of knowledge claim our attention, affecting, often in divergent ways, our imagining of the Renaissance child: social history, in which so much progress has been made in the past decade; pedagogical literature and its institutional discourses and structures; and literary as well as artistic representations. Needless to say, these groupings are quite pragmatic; the real interest lies in their interfaces. Whole treasure-houses of accumulated knowledge already exist in the various areas, impelling us to discover, perhaps, a little more of what the educators were attempting to transform (I hesitate to say a little more of what there was). The educational texts sometimes appear to me, mutatis mutandis, like Petrarchan poetry in relation to the overall situation of women: an encouragement to probe that to which the texts respond, rather than a depiction of reality. At the 1996 Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures, Professor Maria Nikolaeva affirmed that, given the brutal realities that are communicated to the postmodern child via the book and other media of communication, and the fact that at any rate the child is a social construct, there are, so to say, no more children. I am wary of such generalizations either for our times or for Renaissance days. But it strikes me very forcibly that in our studies of the becoming of the human individual in the Renaissance we have worked in isolation, by disciplines and by countries towards increasing our knowledge and improving our representation of the Renaissance child. I thoroughly agree with the questions raised by

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Richard Trexler in introduction to his book on The Children of Renaissance Florence. In what sense is it true that the Renaissance discovered children and youth? How representative are “the angelic putto, the blonde adolescent, the liveried fine young man” of the awareness of the “physical and psychological stages of the pre-adult world” (1) in the Tuscan Quattrocento? And what do we mean by “child” in terms of gender, social status, age group? Philippe Ariès’s pioneering depictions sounded a call for attention to the specificity of the early modern child, whom medieval art until the twelfth century did not know how to represent other than as a reduced-scale adult who might retain the facial expressions, or the musculature of an adult human being. In this perspective the emergence of a Renaissance concept of the child indeed appears at best a working hypothesis, or field of investigation, rather than a consistent phenomenon; and the transformations that had already occurred from the thirteenth century on should not be forgotten. These, according to Ariès, include the very young angel (34), the infant Jesus in gradually more affectionate attitudes towards his Mother (35), the naked living child as opposed to the early, and ongoing nudity of the dead child, including representations of the massacred Innocents, of the soul arriving or departing. Of all the occurrences, that of the infant Jesus is the most frequent, increasingly closer to everyday life. More and more, other holy children – St Anne, St James, and so on, join Jesus, and their activities multiply and become diversified. This painting remained anecdotal, not devoted to “the exclusive portrayal of childhood” (37). Children accompanied adults; they were depicted for their charm, not for the sake of their phase of human life. Ariès gives a number of examples of the seeming detachment of even the most sophisticated adults vis-à-vis children, even their own, as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Montaigne notes feeling regret when his little ones died, but not great sorrow. On the basis of general community callousness, due to overwhelming infant mortality, Ariès makes a statement that I wish to re-examine: “Nobody thought, as we ordinarily think today, that every child already contained a man’s personality” (39). Wastage was thought necessary until the eighteenth century. In paintings and stained-glass windows, portraits of dead children appear in great numbers among the living. New sensibility of the common conscience now grants “that the child’s soul too was immortal,” says Ariès (43), but there is still in my view a long way between that ontological status and the recognition of a unique identity. We must carefully distinguish instinctive maternal and paternal love for the child from the reflective acknowlegment of that child as a separate being. Procreation and continuation of the species being stressed as the only valid reasons for sexual relations, it is obvi-

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ous that countless children were conceived merely as a consequence of the parents’ moral obligation. But that does not mean that there was not also, particularly perhaps in popular culture, evidence of really caring for one’s child; generalization in this regard would be impossible and ahistorical. The magnificent book that came out of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s exhibit a few years ago about childhood in the Middle Ages carries substantial evidence of much concern expressed in ever so many ways. Ontologically, the child exists before physical birth and already has its guardian angel (43). There is ample medical literature about childbirth, and much detailed instruction about handling the newborn, about the importance of its proximity to its mother during the lying-in period, in her bed or in a cradle. There are lullabys, including a very moving one by Charles d’Orléans about the “enfanchonnés” who “n’ont assez fait dodo” (57). Pontano wrote a lullaby for an Italian nurse praising the beauty of the lullaby itself as an offering to the child (57). The baby’s bath, clothing in addition to the proverbial swaddling-clothes, records of fathers shopping for baby clothes, refined toys – the poet Molinet had a toy mill as his emblem; games – some reportedly quite scatological, and sports and pediatric treatises are among countless signs of attention to the child. Social history, however, has been discovering many uncertainties regarding the definition, status, and even safety of the child. In a text entitled “Childhood in Tuscany at the Beginning of the Fifteen Century” Christiane Klapisch-Zuber probes attitudinal changes towards children. In research on tax surveys she notes the paucity of words and age categories to describe them. Children are often fanciulli until they turn into ragazzi around the age of sixteen. But then also, childhood tends to end with the death of the father or the acquisition of economic independence, whichever comes first. Dependency may last a very long time, however. Another factor that obscures personal identity is that children may be undeclared because they may soon die. The number of girls declared is sometimes suspiciously low. Children may be given the names of dead siblings over again. Parents may also claim children and servants who are actually working elsewhere. It was in order to emphasize individuality that Alberti recommended making exact notes about names, dates, events. And generally speaking, in contradistinction to these weaknesses in recognizing children’s identities, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber sees humanism as having set off an authentic renewal in recognizing the young, in encouraging them to seek pragmatic, textual, factual knowledge linked to experience, in achieving a better balance between authority and the quest of autonomy than had existed previously.

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Richard Trexler’s findings on Renaissance Florence range widely between the deeply discouraging and the encouraging, if our criterion is respect for the child and hope for the development of its individuality. His work on the foundlings of Florence shows to what extent the beautiful edifice of orderly, rich, and cultured life among the well-to-do citizenry rested upon the channelling of illegitimate, unwanted children into foundling institutions, starting with the Innocenti. While the procedures for bringing children there exhibited a certain degree of responsibility on the part of the parents or relatives, subsequent statistics also show that many of the children would finally die at the home of wet-nurses and/or of disease, and that mortality was greater among little girls. Texler’s work on infanticide brings a shocking picture of the real contempt for human life that must have existed under the surface but was gradually, too gradually brought under control by a certain degree of papal and episcopal legislation. The good news, so to say, in the work of Trexler and many others concerns the confraternity movement, which shows how “social instrumentalities” came to the aid of families and cities in socializing boys in ways that would be more consistent with religious education than were the traditional European masquerades, charivaris, dances, and parodies more aimed at entertainment. But plain nonsense manifestations were not forgotten, and both reveal a shift in power structure that is only understandable if we see that “child” was a very extended concept encompassing adolescence and, at times, prolonged youth. Another striking example of the presence and yet absence of the child is that of the boy companies on the Elizabethan stage. It is well known that young boys took part in theatre. At times they played women’s roles. They sang in choirs, provided entertainment, and some of them at least departed for universities at the age of fourteen. Were they “apprenticed”? Really taught? Were they exploited? The director of Records of Early English Drama, Alexandra Johnston, refers to much misinformation on the subject; research is now proceeding to find out more about the actual life of the children. From my perspective the past lack of interest in as well as paucity of information on the subject is attested by the manner in which, for instance, E.K. Chambers in The Elizabethan Stage covers it: mostly performances and company moves are reported; there is virtually no description of the activities and lives of the boys. Here is one of the rare concrete remarks made by Chambers: “The boys themselves do not appear to have received any wages but, when their voices had broken, the King made provision for them at the University or otherwise, and until this could be done, the Treasurer … sometimes paid allowances to the Master or some other Gentleman for their maintenance and instruction” (27). And again: “The first re-

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corded performance … is one of the disguisings at the wedding of Prince Arthur and Katharine of Spain in 1501, in which two of the children were concealed in mermaids, singing right sweetly and with quaint harmony” (28). However, more recent work done on some of the boy companies, particularly Reavley Gair’s book The Children of St. Paul’s, shows a deeper historiography, more oriented not only towards describing the life of the children but towards uncovering their function in the rise of English drama, and the educational value of the training they received. In 1531 Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke Named Governour praised the theatre as a mirror of human life and therefore as an aid to the moral education of youth. This moral defence of drama was echoed at Eton. In a statute Henry viii authorized “accomplished plays for public performance” as long as their interpretations of Scripture were reasonably orthodox. Such are some of the signs that motivate Gair to say that the English stage now had its mix of theoretical justification and of suspicion, like that of several other countries. One might say that the children of St Paul’s and other such companies, throughout their complex history, provided a kind of alternative theatre to that of the adult companies, not devoid of a measure of youthful misconduct. Gair also notes à propos a play by Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, how the youthfulness of an actor could be worked into the drama itself and the staging: “Antonio in his soliloquy passes from humble and humiliated childhood to aggressive adulthood” (145). The boy companies have brought us to our second grouping of texts and phenomena, the pedagogical. Pedagogical texts are not only those that include general thoughts on education, such as Erasmus’s De pueris instituendis, but the myriads of treatises on manners and also catechetical materials. All such didactic texts presuppose a need or obligation for the child to learn, but there is a range of attitudes in the relationship of need and obligation to the manner in which learning is to be attained. The question is whether there really occurs, and how, and when, a change of paradigm in the direction of the less hierarchical. Traditionally, pedagogical texts, together with the rationes studiorum that went with them, have been regarded as the most obvious indicators of Renaissance attitudes towards children. It has been customary to gauge the opening up of the Renaissance child’s horizon by these factors, which massively show how much attention was being paid to the education and fashioning of the Renaissance child. It would be foolish to question that monument of achievement. In the case of Erasmus alone, and more specifically one single treatise, the De civilitate, Jean-Claude Margolin has recently shown the Europe-wide and even extra-European penetration of the Erasmian model. I propose that we should read such documents less with a view to what they demanded of

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parents, masters, and children than with a view to what they were seeking to elevate, to correct, to counteract. Such a reading will unmask the writer’s attitude towards children. Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster is in some ways exemplary, not only because of the role his most famous pupil, Elizabeth i, played in its composition but because he shares in Erasmus’s admiration for intelligence and in the enthusiasm of the upper levels of English society for the intellectual and moral training of the young. There is, however, no doubt that even in book 1 (if we leave aside book 2, since it deals mostly with the study of Latin) the focus is more on the subject-matter, the method, the transforming intellectual ideal, than on the young person about to be transformed by it. The incipit of book 1 (as all incipits, rhetoric tells us) is revealing in this regard; it says: “After the child …” – just so: no presentation of the child. He/she is there just to be taught, an object of instruction. “After the child has learned perfectly the eight parts of speech, let him just learn the right joining together of substantives with adjectives, the noun with the verb, the relative with the antecedent” (13). Admittedly, Ascham is dealing with objectives and methods of teaching, and he is habitually dry; even so, this opening statement shows how much he takes for granted: that the child has already learned the eight parts of speech, that the child’s business is the learning of grammar (the verb “learned” is used twice in succession), and that perfection is expected. Further on, explanations are given – for example, that all this must be instilled early so as to displace or uproot the bad habits into which the child falls so easily. The child is sensitive to signs of incompetence on the part of the teacher. The good teacher is the one who knows how to enlist the child’s understanding, who answers questions, thus paying attention to the child’s curiosity, who prefers to “bow” rather than “break” any contrary disposition on the part of the child. These signs of flexibility moderate an overall scheme that is unremittingly severe: “To have children brought to good perfectness in learning, to all honesty in manners, to have all faults rightly amended, to have every vice severely corrected” (20), and this includes, for fathers, “weeding from their children ill things and ill company” (45). I grant that in the case of Ascham this may have signified a restricted, indeed class-controlled environment. Juan Luis Vivés, by contrast, has been credited with democratizing literacy and culture and with demanding, from teachers as well as pupils, consistency between doctrine and life. But he too (De disciplinis tradendis, book 2) removes the learning situation from ordinary society by placing the school geographically far from the temptations of cities, courts, ports, highways, and – women. True, all these restrictions aim at clearing from the boy’s

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path anything that might distract him from the core of the learning process, which is an inward process. They are intended to facilitate the right sort of experience, particularly contact with nature and with the pastoral trades, to encourage games and sports. In the first period, which goes from age seven to fifteen, language and philology are primordial, while scientific and philosophical content is left for the second period, which goes from fifteen to twenty-five. But does all this apply to girls as well as boys? Since few humanists design courses of study for both sexes, it is all the more important to consult Vives’s Institutio christianae feminae on the subject. One French critic sees Vivés as “témoignant d’une parfaite connaissance de la psychologie du beau sexe (Guy, 80),” a sexist way to say that he understood women perfectly! Vivés’s treatise is divided according to three periods of a woman’s life: the young woman, the married woman, and the widow, a division that in itself subordinates the female subject to her position vis-à-vis men. Certainly Vivés is in favour of a substantial education for girls, and in that sense gives them a more equal chance than do other authors of pedagogical treatises. Scholarship elevates the mind, and obversely, inscitia, lack of culture, accounts for feminine vice in this as well as past centuries (Guy, 81). That the intellectual and the ethical coincide in the author’s motivation should not surprise us in a humanistic setting. The question here is whether the moral reasons for the intellectual training are different for girls and boys. The incipit of book 1 gives rise to a comparison between the need for an early training of the orator according to Quintilian and the need to train the Christian virgin in the practice of virtue from the cradle onwards. There is a special closeness between mother and baby daughter that is immeasurably increased if the mother cares personally for the baby without resorting to a wet-nurse, sees her first smile, admires her facial expressions, hears her first words. So far, all this could apply to a male child as well. What is really different is that, according to Vivés, girls need much closer attention from earliest childhood to ensure that nothing pollutes their purity. Boys have the opportunity to change under the influence of outside contacts. Girls exist in an atmosphere of closure; they are indelibly marked by the impressions received from their mothers and nurses, not only because of this closure but because of their softer, more sensual nature. Once the breast-feeding period is over and the young virgin (so designated by the title of the book) is able to speak and walk, she can play with other girls, but always under the watchful eye of an older woman who must nip in the bud any bold or unhealthy attitudes, words, gestures. She is kept away from male children lest she take undue delight in their company. Parents are at fault if they appear to approve, or to laugh about,

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any seemingly innocent signs of seductiveness, as these are bound to turn into harmful tendencies. And as soon as possible the young girl will be expected to assume her essential roles: to serve God, to take care of herself and her appearance, and to assume some household responsibility; Vivés quotes Aristotle as setting this stage of maturation at the age of seven, and Quintilian, who says five (27). The main thing is to implant in the girl the love of work, idleness being counterproductive. As well, intellectual skills, such as reading, in which training should be offered to both girls and boys, are to serve a different end in the case of girls, who should read devotional texts and wisdom literature (38) and be sufficiently cultivated to enter into meaningful conversation with guests. Should the young virgin also want to write, it will be within the same parameters. Preservation of the purity linked to her virginity is a constant underlying theme of book 1. Vivés’s is perhaps an extreme example, but it is well known that even Erasmus and Montaigne advised different programs of study for girls. Symbolical of this aspect of social expectations is one of the illustrations of Merry Wiesner’s Working Women in Renaissance Germany, a woodcut by Bartholomaeus Metlinger that shows a mother and daughter spinning. Their bodily positions are strikingly parallel and so are their heads, even the threads they are spinning. Furthermore, the girl looks in the direction of her mother’s hand rather than her face, her eyes modestly lowered. With her foot the mother is rocking a baby in its cradle, while the little brother, seated on the other side of the table, reads a book! The change that is occurring in the direction of better understanding of the child and its individuality seems partial to male children. But no change of paradigm would have been possible if some of the most innovative authors had not identified with the child, on the wings of their own imagination, personally and subjectively, in a variety of texts both fictional and doxographic. Of course, satirical descriptions also point in that direction, by radicalizing the description of situations that need correcting. Such would be the case of the stark and succinct statement made by Firenzuola at the beginning of one of his Novelle, entitled “Sister Appellagia”: There was at Perugia … a very rich monastery, crowded with noble Perugian ladies, who … had erred from their father’s rule, Saint Benedict. Most of the nuns, perhaps all, being thoroughly in accord with the abbess, occupied themselves only in procuring themselves those pleasures of which the want of a dowry, the papa’s avarice, the mamma’s preferences, the step-mother’s jealousy or other similar accidents, had deprived them, and they had carried them to such a pitch that one might easily find virtue everywhere, save in this convent. (87–8)

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Of course, the girls in this semi-fictional convent were not toddlers, but may have been pre-teens. My next example, fictional in a very different way, connotes very early childhood: chapter 11 of Gargantua, situated in the period of the giant’s tender childhood: Gargantua, from three years upwards into five, was brought up and instructed in all convenient discipline, by the commandment of his father; and spent that time like the other little children in the country, that is, in drinking, eating and sleeping; in eating, sleeping and drinking; and in sleeping, drinking and eating. Still he wallowed and rolled himself up and down in the mire and dirt. (14)

Very shortly afterwards Gargantua will be taken away from his medieval-type tutors and entrusted to Ponocrates, the humanist, who will fashion him into a king. But in chapter 11 we are witnessing some hugely untutored, unfettered, unrestrained, and therefore childish activity. It is of course made preposterous by the gigantic size of the baby, but a more compelling source of humour is the description of what he actually does. The truth is, he does not do anything; he engages in a number of absurd gestures; Rabelais takes a cascade of popular sayings in French and turns them into gratuitous actions. The effect of these in common is to deconstruct the wisdom contained in the popular sayings. Gargantua “sharpened his teeth with a top, washed his hands with his broth, and combed his head with a bowl … He would sit down betwixt two stools … say the ape’s pater-noster, return to his sheep … put the plough before the oxen, and claw where it did not itch. He … tickled himself to make himself laugh … He would beat the bushes without catching the birds, thought the moon was made of green cheese, and that bladders are lanterns” (14). This last phrase sums it all up, because “prendre des vessies pour des lanternes” denotes maximum capacity for deluding oneself (or being deluded by others, if you say “nous faire prendre des vessies pour des lanternes”). The baby giant was thus allowed total freedom of fantasy. Now this might just mean the moment of grace before the disciplined life that is to come, an interpretation that makes sense because it makes the episode consistent with what follows, namely, a transformation of the overactive beast into a human being, of instinct into rationality, of disorderly freedom into genteel discipline. We can even concede that Rabelais does not disagree with the Ancients and with St Augustine about childhood’s being spiritually destitute and therefore miserable. But this is not inconsistent with considering our chapter simultaneously a happy explosion of self-expression whereby Rabelais accompanies the insubordinate creature with delight and, therefore, anticipatory irony vis-à-vis

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the voracious program of study that is to engulf all of Gargantua’s being for many years to come. The chapter can be seen as an encomium of happy childish irresponsibility. What about Montaigne? Naturally, one’s mind first turns to the chapter on the education of children in book 1, where the child as such appears in at least two roles. As the subject of education the child is seen in a way that parallels the views of many of the earlier humanists: all occasions are to be turned towards improving the training of its body and mind. True, Montaigne stresses informality, playfulness, and what he calls a severe kindness on the part of the educator, sévère douceur. But let us make no mistake concerning the goal, which is the fashioning of the whole person: “We are not bringing up a soul,” says Montaigne; “we are not bringing up a body; we are bringing up a man. We must not split him in two” (185). Michael Screech uses the verb “bring up” to translate “dresser,” which suggests an authoritarian approach to training. Yes, the whole person is involved, so that there is some sympathy for the child’s need to move around. But decidedly, play is a means to an end. The child must learn to steel itself against all reversals of fortune – a stern program, if a humane one. In one respect Montaigne’s sensibility is completely at one with that of the child, and that is when it comes to corporal punishment. “Get rid of violence and force,” Montaigne advises the teacher; “as I see it, nothing so fundamentally stultifies and bastardizes a well-born nature” (185). Like Erasmus, Montaigne recalls with horror the scenes of violent chastisement he has witnessed: “I have always disliked … the way our colleges are governed … They are a veritable gaol for captive youth … Go there during lesson time: you will hear nothing but the screaming of tortured children and of masters drunk with rage” (186). In that respect Montaigne’s empathy with the child is well known, as is his grateful admiration for the gentle methods his father used in Michel’s own education. By experience, temperament, conviction, Montaigne opts for an “enjoyable” (186) and not overly bookish set of methods. If our purpose, however, is to ascertain Montaigne’s vision of the child as person rather than subject of education, we must also take into account the essay “On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children,” which tells a different, complementary story. There Montaigne confesses his indifference to infants: “I am incapable of finding a place for that emotion which leads people to cuddle newborn infants while they are still without movement of soul or recognizable features of body to make themselves lovable” (435). This turns out to be not a rejection of babies so much as the basis of comparison with slightly older children, whom it is worthwhile to know as individuals. Thus, each time Montaigne appears to view children with disfavour, that turns out

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not to be so, because what he is really tracking is the human person within the child – as when he declares his preference for knowing the activities of children “when they are fully formed” in comparison with hearing about the “skippings and jumpings and babyish tricks” of little ones. The reassurance is of short duration: relationships with grownup children and the matter of wealth management and legacy occupy the major part of the essay. But this too gives way to the underlying concern about communicating with one’s children rather than playing traditional roles. And surely this concern applies to children of any age; it can safely be said that in this essay Montaigne welcomes children into his vision, but on his own terms, when they can reciprocate in ways that are no longer completely childish. Curiously, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, so dedicated to the understanding and development of the human person, has very little to say about the developmental stages. The passage from immaturity to maturity is couched in terms of the former’s being dominated by emotion, which gradually gives way to rationality. This implies that in childhood humanity is not yet perfected. Castiglione also stresses the need for the child to grow up happily, in a concrete and joyful rather than philosophical sense – for a happiness for the sake of the child, that the child can enjoy (306). Happiness blooms off-stage, so to say; it is given its due by allowed to do just that, to be happiness; but humanity is not fully actualized until reason is in charge. Could we not say that the humanists’ inclination tended more towards pedagogical theory than towards the handling of live children, especially in large numbers? The case of Erasmus in this respect is a complex one. (I am now returning to Erasmus through the prism of literature as opposed to pedagogical theory.) Much has been made of the fact that, although he often taught, his preference was for contact with particular children he knew, such as Thomas More’s daughter Margaret or Johann Erasmius Froben, who inspired the earliest Colloquies. In this respect, the dedication of August 1524 to this boy sends mixed signals because of the way formality stifles affectionate spontaneity in its approach to the child, described as “a boy of the highest promise,” although in point of fact he was, to say the least, a slow learner. “The book has grown to a regular volume in size; and you too should match your growth in years by advancement in sound learning and good morals.” (Let us keep in mind that the child is eight years old.) “You bear no common hopes,” Erasmus continues. “These you must fulfill. To surpass them would be most glorious. Fail them you cannot, surely, without utter disgrace.” In this skilful crescendo we discern the rhetorician. “I say this,” pursues Erasmus, “not because of dissatisfaction with your progress thus far” (after all, one must not discourage children) “but to urge you on to a

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faster pace, especially since you have now reached the age that is unexcelled for absorbing the seeds of literature and godliness” (3). This latter expression in itself, while true to the program announced in many other texts – I am thinking particularly of De utilitate colloquiorum – jars when addressed (even if we know that it was written for the reading public rather than the boy) to a child one loves and with whose family one frequently associates. However, dedications are cold and formal because they are for public consumption; the genre requires it. To probe the kind of engagement we can see on Erasmus’s part with children as childish human beings, I have used an indirect method, which is to track his subjectivity in texts with third-person actors, such as colloquies, where in appearance at least the “I” is hidden. Some of the very early colloquies simply embody conversations between master and pupil or pupils. Let us take, for example, Monita pedagogica, a lesson in manners. (Of course, the dialogue is also, and at the start, primarily, a tool for teaching Latin; but do we not know today how much ideology can hide in a textbook)? “How long have you been away from home?” asks the master. “Nearly six months.” “You should have added ‘Sir!› barks the master. The boy accepts the correction: “Nearly six months, Sir.” At this point the conversation seems to fill with sympathy for the child: “Don’t you miss your mother?” “Sometimes, yes.” “Would you like to go and see her?” The boy rises to the bait: “I would, Sir, with your kind permission!” Instead of the expected permission, or hope of it, the master retorts with yet another demand of civility: “Now you should have bowed!” (21–2). The text may mirror the way masters did address children, and in that way convey a satirical glimpse of the character as seen by Erasmus. Furthermore, the choice of the topic of the absent mother to browbeat the child appears to me to be a personal choice on his part. Similarly, De lusu, “Sport,” where a group of boys ask to go out and play and are criticized for their wantonness: Cocles says, “The entire company of your pupils beg you to let them play.” “That’s all you do even without permission,” replies the master. The children defend themselves: “We work as hard as we can. And if anything has been left unfinished hitherto, it will be amended with diligence afterward.” Once again, it is the character of the children that the master attacks by way of saying they will not clean up after themselves, or will not finish their homework or do their household chores: “Fine menders you are! Who will be guarantor or surety for this future performance?” (23), So the children are just being children; the master judges them by severe adult standards for their childishness. On occasion, though this may simply be a topos linked with the condemnation of the practice of handing babies over to wet-nurses, Erasmus will identify with the baby

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bereft of its mother. Such is certainly the case in Puerpera, “The New Mother,” where Eutrapelus, in his vehement condemnation of this practice, tries to dissuade Fabulla from following it. Handing over her child to a wet-nurse would be quasi-criminal. Erasmus appears to espouse totally the cause of the abandoned infant, who will miss the fragrance of its mother’s body and the sound of her voice. In this text, through the mediation of Eutrapelus, Erasmus identifies with the infant, as he also identifies in De pueris instituendis with children who undergo severe corporal punishment. Though it is difficult to divide pedagogical from literary evidence completely, it appears at best likely of Erasmus and his contemporaries that where imagination reconstructed experience, there was greater impetus toward change. It is appropriate to end on an Erasmian note because Erasmus succeeded in overcoming his relative distance vis-à-vis actual children through flashes of subjective engagement. Nor was he alone. In the seventeenth century John Amos Comenius, whom Bayle and Diderot would describe only as a dangerous mystical fanatic but who reformed entire school systems in various countries, devised illustrated dictionaries and books for children and wrote with great tenderness an Informatorium about nursery school, stressing at last the concreteness of the child’s sense experience, especially visual experience, but also the importance of songs and nursery rhymes in the vernacular, capable of bringing the world into the child’s awareness through the voices of mother, nurse, father, and teacher. The Renaissance, with all its inconsistencies and discontinuities, took enormous steps towards making the child a specific citizen of the human family. It pulled the process forward with its ambitious, challenging, albeit at times tyrannical and overly theoretical models, as would utopias. In many ways, in many places, that quest is still on.

works cited Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Alfred Knopf 1962. Ascham, Roger. The Schoolmaster. Ed. Lawrence V. Ryan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1970. Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. George Bull. London: Penguin Books 1976. Chambers, E.K. “The Boys Companies.” The Elizabethan Stage. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1923. Vol. 2, bk. 3, chap. 12, 1–76. Gair, W. Reavley. The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553– 1608. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982.

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Guy, Alain. Vivés. Paris: Seghers 1972. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Colloquies of Erasmus. Trans. Craig R. Thompson. Chicago: Chicago University Press 1965. Firenzuola, Agnolo. Tales. Paris: Isidore Liseux 1889. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Trans. Lydia Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985. de Montaigne, Michel. The Essays. Trans. and ed. M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Press 1978. Margolin, Jean-Claude. Erasme, précepteur de l’Europe. Paris: Éditions Julliard 1995. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica 1952. Trexler, Richard C. The Children of Renaissance Florence. Vol. 1 of Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence. Binghamton: suny Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies 1993. Vivés, J.L. De l’institution de la femme chrestienne. Trans. Pierre de Changy. Le Havre: Le Male et Cie. 1891. Wiesner, Merry E. Working Women in Renaissance Germany. New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press 1986.

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part four In Memory of Northrop Frye

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21 Northrop Frye and the Possibility of Intercultural Dialogue

As it happens, Canada’s two best-known contemporary thinkers, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, taught throughout their respective careers at the University of Toronto. Marshall McLuhan, as a theoretician of communication, coined a certain number of felicitous expressions to describe the world of today, including “the global village,” a formula that so dramatically telescopes together all populations and all cultures by the power of the media. Northrop Frye, as a theoretician of literature, inventoried and systematized the creations of the human imagination as expressed and organized in written form. One might be tempted to say that both writers took universals and universality for granted, but that would betray a superficial attitude they both managed to avoid. Let us say that they did not question the possibility that a few ideas are universally acceptable, if not accepted, and that they can be endowed with form. McLuhan dealt with them in the materiality of their technological transformations, Frye in their archetypal logic. It is by dint of this silence, rather than any assertion, that both writers present us, at the highest level of generality, with the problem of the variation of the universal among cultures. In relation to Frye’s thought we shall briefly examine, in the context of the “global village,” the problem of the universality of a construction that appears to establish communication, perhaps communion,

Chapter of The Importance of Northrop Frye, ed. S. Krishnamoorthy Aithal (Kaipur: Humanities Research Centre 1993), 156–68.

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among cultures and thus challenges us to test this promise of universality. Offhand, prior to such a critical review of the concept, the least one can say is that Frye’s work invites intercultural dialogue. Philosophically, it presents itself as providing the foundations of such dialogue inasmuch as it organizes major cultural wholes and their aesthetic icons, especially their literary icons, into a coherent system that is both differentiated and complete. It is precisely this aura of success that may well predetermine our criteria of success for a philosophy of culture, inasmuch as we may be situated with Frye himself at the intersection of Greek and Judaeo-Christian sources; and this situation itself is in need of critical analysis. But why react, and to what? To that which may be a (perhaps unconscious and at any rate unanalysed) tendency towards acculturation of the Other at the level of the epistemology and methodology of the human sciences, a temptation that is comfortable because it leads to a reassuring taxonomy, making the Other familiar and rationally knowable, but that might betray us because it reaps only what it sows, neutralized images of the Other. In particular, if the epistemology of the human sciences is to offer all cultures a mirror as undistorting as possible, in order that Others (whoever they are and whoever the researcher is) may have optimum chances of also recognizing themselves in it, it might be preferable to slow down rather than to hasten the universalizing impulse. Yet there is no doubt that in its first manifestations, Frye’s thought has every chance to move in the universal direction without abandoning the particular – all the more reason to examine why, when the study of “other” cultures is involved, the universalizing tendency might annihilate the very benefits that it is capable of yielding, and how this can happen. In 1957 Frye published his Anatomy of Criticism. Immediately this book established the profound originality of his thought in Canada itself, and its compatibility – at the time – with critical innovation elsewhere, whether that was called New Criticism, Nouvelle critique, or structuralism: all these currents converged in their strong emphasis on allowing the study of literary phenomena a specific domain hitherto blurred or displaced by the study of their socio-historical determinants. In retrospect it might be said that in a number of countries literary studies underwent a self-legitimation crisis of the kind that all fields of study sometimes experience, but that, in the particular case of literary studies, it was to the benefit of the intercultural dialogue, since much thought was given to establishing relations among homogeneous phenomena, that is, phenomena answering to comparable criteria within and among cultures. Without ever denying its origins in English literature and in a Protestant spirituality grounded upon the Bible, Frye’s model succeeds in en-

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dowing the literary system with a strong and specific identity, that of a language capable of justification on its own terms and first of all to itself. The point was not to totally sever that language from the everyday world but to explore it and know its structures better, so that it might better serve that “real” world as a coherent system of signs embodying discursive thought. “Both literature and mathematics proceed from postulates, not facts; both can be applied to external reality and yet exist also in a ‘pure’ or self-contained form … The symbol neither is nor is not the reality which it manifests” (351). We may recall here that, about the same time, the French poet Pierre Emmanuel characterized poetry, with its fabric of symbols, as a “fiery reason.” One of the very first spectrums of Frye’s literary system is that which classifies fictional heroes in time, according to five descending stages: mythical heroes superior to ordinary human beings; glorious heroes of tales, legends, romances, and epics in which natural laws are suspended, though not inexistent; tragic heroes surpassing human norms by their qualities and the strength of their passions, though not situated beyond the social and natural order; characters who are normal – that is, comparable to human beings in a comic or realistic setting; and finally characters below the norm, viewed through ironic distance, and ranging from the absurd hero of yesteryear to the dehumanized or dehumanizing creatures of today. To this spectrum of actors as central narrative structures correspond spectrums embodying the entire network of narrative strategies: viewpoint, vision, description, dialogue, spatio-temporal organization, style. Long before Frye it was well known that realisms are ordered around normal, ordinary characters. What was less obvious was the manner in which the character of a significant subset of the literary system flows from this knowledge. The intercultural potential of such a systemic approach can be seen immediately: projecting the human situation into narrative is a widespread and, let us risk saying it, universal phenomenon. Universal also is the vital osmosis that occurs at the frontier of the mythical and the literary: with or without the impulse of religion, within or outside a canon, orally or in written form, as far as it is given us to see in the past and the present and to extrapolate into the future, the imagination secretes myths in which mankind contemplates and endeavours to understand itself through the narrative form it creates. Though Frye himself does not multiply examples beyond the literatures of Europe and North America, he does use a few. In any case, the applicability of his system is such that examples complementary to his own, and stemming from different traditions, come easily to mind: classical tragedy seems to call for comparisons with the Japanese Noh theatre; Homeric or Virgilian epics, or the Nordic Kalevala, with

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India’s Mahabarata; picaresque novels such as Lazarillo de Tormes or Gil Blas in Europe with The Monkey in China; or again, the sacredness of the Bible with that of the Koran, including the personalities of their respective prophets. Frye does not actually assert in so many words that the five phases of the hero’s descent are present in literatures other than those he studies, but at least a comparability develops that makes it possible to foresee the characteristics and rhythms of such developments in other civilizations, and particularly among the emergent literatures. Let us turn to another aspect of the literary system, that of the symbolical role of verbal structures: in a poem, words tend to detach themselves from their accustomed denotations and to take on connotations stemming from the poem itself; but it is no less true that a description within a novel similarly differs from a scientific description. For this reason it has been said that “a poem tells us one thing, and signifies another” (Riffaterre, 11). It is when the verbal material ceases to designate solely the mythical or historical event or the social truth that gave it birth, and espouses the conventions or rejoins the genre that will make it communicable, that it becomes literature and enters the literary system. Here again we run very little risk of deviating from intercultural reciprocity if we say that the advent of literary communication proper is always and everywhere a sign of civilization, one in recognition of which there can be progression as well as regression (the Rushdie case might serve as example of a literary work reverting to the status of the political text). Myths of paradise, hell, and apocalypse are universally nourished by images of nature: culture is always situated in, and in relation – sometimes a relation of opposition – to nature. But cultural anthropologists as well as literary critics would be exceedingly naïve if they thought that the same imagery has the same meaning in two different cultures. A recent paper has shown, for example, the absurdity of using uncritically European literary conventions linked to autumn in the poetry of Israel, which has a different climate and cycle of seasons (Ben Porat). Frye himself was prudent enough to assign limits to his own universalizing tendency: according to him, the great cyclical myths of birth, death, resurrection take on a different meaning where there is belief in reincarnation and where there is not, though ultimately a resurrection might also be considered a new birth, if one insists on reducing everything to the same common denominator. “To this pattern of identical recurrence, the death and revival of the same individual, all other cyclical patterns are as a rule assimilated. The assimilation can of course be much closer in Eastern culture, where the doctrine of reincarnation is generally accepted, than in the West” (159). But here pre-

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cisely the problem of applicability that I stress comes in: for purposes of classification it might be indifferent, and it might even be beneficial, to assimilate birth and resurrection. But can one really assimilate to each other the Christian ontology, which extols above all values the incarnation of a given soul in a given body, and that of Buddhism, which dissolves this alliance, and thus ignore the implicit difference between these two respective mentalities with respect to personal experience? The initial educational value of a universalizing system (here we may think, for example, of that of Comenius in the seventeenth century, which conquered the school systems of all Protestant countries of Europe by its very simplicity) does not guarantee it against all risks of extrapolation. Let us consider the relationship traced by Frye between the four major literary categories that are logically prior to the genres subsumed in them, and the four seasons of the year: comedy, for example, corresponds to spring by its energy and its will to transform society. Romance, with its idealistic bent and the pattern of the quest or of heroic struggle against evil, corresponds to summer and embodies the fulfilment of desire. Tragedy corresponds to autumn because in it the hero finally confronts the order of reality and nature: It is largely through the tragedies of Greek culture that the sense of the authentic natural basis of human character comes into literature. In romance the characters are still largely dream-characters; in satire they tend to be caricatures; in comedy their actions are twisted to fit the demands of a happy ending. In full tragedy the main characters are emancipated from dream, an emancipation which is at the same time a restriction, because the order of nature is present. (206–7)

Finally, the mythos of winter corresponds to satirical and ironical forms, to the leap into experience. These are only samples of the many features of Frye’s literary system. My purpose was not to describe it exhaustively but to underscore the systematic character that is a sine qua non of universal applicability. The system is conditioned by two concepts, both of which call into question the universal uncomfortably lodged in a particular, betraying by its very discomfort its universalizing vocation. 1. Frye himself, in The Critical Path (1971), alludes to the deductive character of his interpretive method. Detailed rhetorical analysis has its place, but it must rest upon “a deductive framework derived from the study of the structure” (25); unless it functions in this manner, it is not scientifically exportable, so to say. Furthermore, that framework is also necessary for the study of the reception of works outside their

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original cultures and for the integration of emergent literatures into the system of world literature. Frye’s system views literature, by and large, retrospectively, whereas the reciprocal openness among cultures that at present is necessary to literary studies demands a prospective attitude along the entire critical trajectory among context-author-textreader. That Frye was open to more inductive approaches was pointed out at a recent conference in connection with the greater flexibility of his categories, and the more experimental character of his interventions, when he dealt with English Canadian literature than when he dealt with literatures long since codified (Hutcheon). 2. Historically, in the field of cultural creations, Frye ultimately sees the confrontation of two opposed and complementary principles: on the one hand that which he calls “concern,” and which is not Heidegger’s metaphysical preoccupation but refers to the historical roots of literary texts, linking their original meaning to their original social function and enabling them to serve that initial cause, whatever its relationship to the dominant ideology; and on the other, the principle of liberation, which frees the literary work with respect to that primary historical end. Thus the Bible, which in Frye’s view is the very prototype of literature in that – in the Western imagination at least – it provides a model for the intelligibility of the universe, has countless times been reintegrated into the orbit of “concern,” of social responsibility. But is it the case that the novel, drama and poetry escape the dialectic of these two principles? Among a host of examples let us think of Gorki’s novels and those of the Indian novelist Prem Chand, so parallel in their social preoccupations; of the poetry of Eluard, so divided at certain times between the political and the aesthetic; or of Shakespearean drama, always interpretable from the limited viewpoint of its historical grounding but always filled with universal significance. Among thousands of examples one might think of the japonisation of Hamlet as a Kabuki play. Through the analysis of that by dint of which a given text expresses its culture of origin and, simultaneously, the receptor culture, one can try to unveil systematically the secret of those coincidences of the universal and the particular that were the most memorably successful, because acceptable to both the originating and the receiving culture. In the case of the Kabuki theatre, art is invested far more in the actor than in the written text. In Robun Kanagaki’s play entitled A Yamato Brocade Print of Hamlet, fidelity to Shakespeare’s themes and characters coincides with perfect adherence to the aesthetics of the Kabuki theatre (Kawatake). Frye’s aim does not appear to consist in imposing a system of interpretation but in establishing on solid ground the activity of interpreta-

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tion that enables readers of all countries to appropriate freely, for and by themselves, the meaning of what they read – that is, to move between the pole of ideology and that of freedom. The fundamental condition for ensuring that the particular is not imprisoned by the universal but is creatively manifested in relation to it is precisely the detachment of the poetic discourse from the objective discourse and its utilitarian goals. Detachment, rather than autonomy: for in the end the very freedom of the poetic discourse, which is also that of imagination, embodies the fulfilment of one of the deepest needs of society. It is in this sense that literature, according to Frye, forms a language that is nourished by social aspirations, and nourishes them in its turn. It is important to realize that this asymptotic relationship belongs to all cultures. While objective and utilitarian forms of discourse, those which Frye calls “demotic,” are ordered in terms of the concept of progress, poetry (or “mythology”) relates to experience; it lives on memory, and on the past. For that reason it is infinitely fragmented, while objective discourse exhibits a smooth and homogeneous surface. Such, at any rate, was Frye’s position at the time of The Critical Path, in 1971. It is, we feel, at that point insufficiently sensitive to the disruptions that can affect the objective discourse, whether by subjectivity disguised as objectivity or by the degree of indeterminacy inherent, for example, in the chaos theory. But on this point Frye is less concerned with establishing the epistemological bases of his vision of the poetic, indeed the literary, than with asserting the infinite variety and variability of its manifestations, precisely because the poetic in its essence defies the logical. If that is the case, wherein lies poetic universality, so obviously distinct from the universality of reason as defined by Descartes? Precisely in this opposition: “No matter what compromises or social arrangements may be made, poetry speaks the language of myth and not the language of reason or fact: further, it represents something primitive in society, not something that progressively improves or refines itself” (Critical Path, 84). Now, to downplay the impact of the aesthetic difference between the primitive and the evolved is already to grant the emergent literatures, including their oral components, entry into the literary system; and it is, in principle at least, to deny the West its superiority and its rights of the first-born: “The doctrine of progress embraced both a complacent comparison of Western societies to those in other parts of the world, and a parallel comparison of ourselves to our ancestors” (85). This means that even if in fact Frye in his own critical theory has focused on the literature of Europe and North America, nothing in his global conception of literature warrants according the latter a hierarchical status. On the contrary, Frye affirms the relativity of all “myths” in relation to

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one another and also in relation to the social concern to which they are originally linked: “An open mythology establishes the relativity of each myth of concern within it, and so emphasizes the element of construct or imaginative vision in the myth” (107). The world mosaic of cultures does not exist in a homogeneous historical time; not only is there perpetual change, but change according to very unequal rhythms, and by no means in a univocal or unidirectional progression. In order that a literary work may serve as a means of communication among cultures, the teacher, the critic, the interpreter must choose and present it in such a way that it will encounter with some precision the cultural awareness of the receptor group. All around us, in brutal contrast with the apparent serenity of Northrop Frye’s theoretical system of culture, we are witnessing an unprecedented fragmentation of cultural communities within the political groupings that link them more or less loosely to one another. Frye’s thought does not guarantee easy cultural communication among these communities; it does, however, in a way so far unsurpassed, institute cultural communication as a domain of research, and even of encounter, to the extent that our own myths renew their identity and their difference in contact with the myths of others; and in this way Frye’s thought makes it possible to continue to hold intercultural dialogue.

works cited Ben Porat, Zhiva. “Represented Reality and Literary Models: European Autumn on Israeli Soil.” Acculturation, vol. 9, Proceedings of the XIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association. Bern: Peter Lang 1994. 117–23. Emmanuel, Pierre. Poésie, raison ardente. Paris: luf 1948. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957. – The Critical Path. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1971. Hutcheon, Linda. “Frye Recoded: Postmodernity and the Conclusions.” In The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin Lee and Robert Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994. 105–21. Kawatake, Toshi. Kabuki and Shakespeare, Shakespeare from the Globe, Tokyo Globe Company program, 1991. Kawatake writes: “Robun’s script is extremely faithful to Shakespeare, while at the same time brilliantly utilizing to the full the traditional dramaturgical style of Joruri and Kabuki with their unique style of presentation and characterization. It demonstrates a total assimilation of the original, resulting in a truly masterful Japanization of Shakespeare.” This shows “the thoroughgoing universality of Shakespeare and the wonderfully unique beauty of Kabuki.” Riffaterre, Michael. Sémiotique de la poésie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1983.

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22 Northrop Frye and the Historicity of Literature

Pondering the legacy of Northrop Frye necessarily leads to recognizing its scope, which goes far beyond the study of the literary system alone; this in turn entails recognizing the philosophical status of his thought. In Anatomy of Criticism, once he established the specificity of the critical activity among intellectual disciplines, Frye showed little interest in the labels others would apply to his sphere of activity: critic or historian or theorist or philosopher. In practice, however, he always dealt, explicitly or by implication, with the whole universe of human culture, emphasizing the role of works of imagination within it. The philosophical dimension of Frye’s concept of literary historicity also leads us to the implications that his transformation of historicity harbours for overcoming the perpetual hesitancy of literary studies between the more and the less historical, and to the way in which these implications extend to the conceptualizing and writing of literary histories of the present and the future. Histories are stories; histories of literature, it should not be forgotten, are the stories of stories and as such (like myth, fable, or romance) they will continue to be written because nations, and sometimes even the international community, aspire to having their cultural icons enshrined in continuous narratives.

From the conference on “The Legacy of Northrop Frye,” Victoria University, Toronto, Oct. 1992. Published in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994), 296–303.

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In our own time the emphasis on identity and otherness has refocused attention upon the individual, the unique, that which is most difficult to reduce to system. Does Frye’s thought respond to this need? The answer to this question lies in part his concept of historicity and the manner in which it is able to capture the time-bound and unique within the coherence of a total history. The structure of Frye’s literary system manages to incorporate time without isolating any part of the system in a temporal ghetto in which it could no longer relate to, and be compared with, any other part of the system. On many occasions he calls forth phenomena from immensely distant temporal and spatial as well as cultural horizons in order to emphasize their relatedness; but he does so without negating these distances, without eradicating the historical character of each element. If we consider as an example Frye’s ordering of the phases of satire, we see that it defies rigid periodizations, and in that sense it may appear separate from chronology; yet in itself it features a concatenation of changes telling of a continuous story of relations that can be either sequential or paradigmatic at a given time, or both. The sixth phase of satire, which “presents human life in terms of largely unrelieved bondage” (238) and may feature prisons, madhouses, lynching mobs, and places of execution as well as forms of social tyranny, goes back a very long way to Dante’s Inferno, manifesting itself as well in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, Kafka’s Penal Colony, and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Granted, the archetypal framework of these groupings is designed for transhistorical comparability of narratives severed from their mythical backgrounds; but even as they intersect and communicate, they create a time of their own – call it mythical or literary – that relates metonymically to human states. Specific literary histories, often based on pre-set periodizations, tend to colour literary phenomena in terms of those periodizations. Frye, by contrast, demonstrates commonalities of phenomena that may be either distant or close in time as well as space; and, whether close or distant, history is what their relations engender. In short, his universals work synchronically as well as diachronically. Obvious examples of this process are shown in The Secular Scripture, where the hierarchy of four verbal structures – highly mythical ones such as the biblical or the Platonic, non-literary, serious verbal structures, “relatively serious” ones in agreeable, popular forms; and “literature designed only to entertain or amuse, which is out of sight of truth” (21) – is shown to operate for centuries, indeed millennia, as is the even more radical opposition of the mythical and the fabulous. The past tense Frye uses in these universalizing, broad-brush statements indicates that they are meant his-

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torically. For example, the severely Platonic distinction between truthoriented and enjoyment-oriented verbal structures became eroded, partly on account of “Aristotle’s more liberal conception of mimesis,” so that in the subsequent tradition “literature did succeed in gaining a real place in the Christian social order. As its place was essentially secular, the imaginative standards came to be set by the fabulous writers, and the mythical ones had to meet those standards” (21). That these should be statements about the past made in the past tense is only natural, since they are meant to summarize and organize immense corpora of the past in such a way as to orient the analysis of story-telling in modern times; as well, they do not contradict detailed intellectual and aesthetic histories dealing with the relationship between truth-claim and form in various temporal layers of the Western past. The point is that these glimpses over the past from the stratosphere of a certain present have become materials for the construction of a system that aspires to universality and stresses recurrence rather than temporal distance. For Frye the periods of cultural history are elementary facts of life which can be taken for granted: “The history of literature seems to break down into a series of cultural periods of varying length, each dominated by certain conventions” (28). In contradistinction to the kind of literary history from which Frye distances himself, these cultural periods are not containers of dead storage: at all times any part of the system can gain renewed life if a critical reading lifts it from the past into a new transhistorical relationship, and that critical reading itself enters literary history. It is this ongoing conversion of the “merely” historical into the live contemporaneity of the literary system that distinguishes Frye among all critical thinkers. It explains his own practice and also paves the way for new work capable of overcoming the handicaps of literary history – which Frye, René Wellek, and others have identified – by incorporating a renewed historicity into the system itself. By the same token it helps to overcome the opposition, which had long divided the entire field of literary studies, between the historical and the theoretical attitude, one situating the truth about texts in various aspects of their genesis, the other in a timeless continuum or, more recently, in the discontinuities of individual reading experiences, which no system can reunite. To read Frye is to encounter at every step statements that provocatively describe the vast historical landscapes resulting from this vision; invariably, the reader is challenged to probe the universality of their scope. At the intersection of the “everywhere and always” of literary symbolization as it appears in times and cultures very distant from one another, and of the irreducible and irreplaceable “here and now” of

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each work, Frye calls attention to this encounter of the universal and the particular. The first thing that Anatomy of Criticism creates is precisely this radical transformation of historicity, rather than a denial of it. We should heed A.C. Hamilton’s warning: “For those who had not read Frye’s earlier articles, it must have been surprising that he should base his poetics on a new literary history that reveals the specific historicity of all literary works – so surprising that the essay was misunderstood then and remains so now” (45). From this perspective, the system introduced by Anatomy constructs, indeed is, a new literary history. By and large, early readers and critics emphasized the new history less than Frye’s demolition of traditional literary history. Anatomy initially seemed to coincide most easily with the various forms of New Criticism and with literary structuralism. Yet the literary-historical dimension should have been emphasized because – in whatever way a thinker decides to deal with works of the imagination in relation to history – literary works cannot be severed from the cultural processes linked to their birth. These cultural processes are internal to literature; they are “history within literature” (Critical Path, 24) rather than what the French call histoire événementielle, with its presumed causative effects upon literature. To sum up, the internal order of literature invoked by Frye excludes neither history nor literary history nor, most importantly, historicity itself; it includes them, however, within its own articulation. Its specific temporality has to do, in Proustian terms, with the “time regained” of the literary system rather than the “time lost” of past occurrences. One of the first consequences of this is that chronology will not be the ordering principle of literary history reborn. According to A.C. Hamilton, the new discipline will “go beyond a chronological survey of literature to an awareness of its total order” (55), incorporating the diachronic within the synchronic. The fictional modes that form the core of the chapter on historical criticism in Anatomy constitute an overarching example of such a total order, with a temporal succession broadly applicable to literatures anywhere, since all have sacred beginnings and portray gods and heroes before descending from romance to high mimetic, low mimetic, and finally ironic modes. As with any evolutionary theory – and one must remember that Frye’s Spenglerian antecedents predispose him to think in evolutionary terms – there is danger in claiming universal validity for such broad schemata. Though it might be tempting to portray it so, history cannot be predetermined. Metahistory, as Hayden White calls it, is not a system of insuperable rules but a place of reflection, of watching for the crises and creations of human consciousness, of possibilites for interpretation. This is particularly important in the case of literatures

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that have not been fully inventoried and codified, such as emerging literatures, minority literatures, literatures written in exile. Undeniably, however, and regardless of the degree of necessity we may attribute to his conception of it, Frye introduces among literary phenomena an order of succession. Throughout his work Frye has left countless indications of the way in which literary works (or aspects of works, or groupings of works) enter this order and, by the same token, adumbrate directions for future literary historiography. To show the continuity of Frye’s attitudes, let us examine The Great Code to see if, in this respect, it coherently echoes the much earlier Anatomy. In defining the relationship of the poetic and the historical, the essential movement consists in purifying the former from all circumstantial history, which at any rate is not there. In biblical stories such as the Exodus, “when we move into what looks like actual history, to which we can attach some dates and supporting evidence,” Frye writes in The Great Code, “we find that it is didactic and manipulated history” (40). Or again: “The priority is given to the mythical structure or outline of the story, not to the historical content” (41). The Bible is composed of “mythical accretions” rather than identifiable “facts”: “It is the bits of credible history that are expendable, however many of them there may be” (42). And finally: “Homer’s sense of history does not mean that he is writing history. Similarly with the Bible” (42). Granted, these statements deal with myth in the Bible and are grounded in what Frye calls the metaphorical phase of language. But this is precisely what makes them so seminal: it is the very prototype of literature, the model of models, that derives its literary nature from being mythical and not depending on historical evidence in the factual sense. Thus, not unlike many formalists and structuralists, Frye assigned secondary importance to the genesis of literary phenomena and primary importance to the understanding of their relations and structures. However, his opposition to older concepts of literary history did not stem from any wariness of historical change, as if it were an intellectual impurity. Rather, in his eyes the potential for intellectual impurity lay in failing to understand the necessary severance of literary works from their origins. In the history of Russian formalism, which at first excluded temporality, the return of temporality by dint of, for example, the concept of evolution as expounded by Tynianov was hailed as a breakthrough. Later, a post-war structuralist Lévi-Strauss, in Tristes tropiques, proudly reinstated the very diachrony that he had banished for both instrumental and epistemological reasons. For Frye the relevance of literary temporality is obvious; but he does not stress it when bringing together comparable elements within the system, which

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might originate in widely separate times and places. The distinction French scholars have long made between histoire littéraire (the history of writers and institutions) and histoire de la littérature (the temporal unfolding of literature itself) receives in Frye’s theory as well as his practice its fullest embodiment ever. An example drawn from one of Frye’s unpublished notebooks might serve to illustrate the manner in which his mind transmuted phenomena into the history that was to become the Anatomy. Notebook 39 contains materials concerning English poetry of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. As a very young teacher Frye structured the outline of his presentation of Renaissance English poetry up to Donne. It is by no means devoid of background information about social life in the Renaissance – such as descriptions of class tensions between aristocracy and new oligarchy, the rise of capitalism, the geographical explorations – or about the state of the English language, inasmuch as it conditions the evolution of poetry. In discussing Sidney, Frye included plans to deal not only with his poetry and poetics but also with his personality as a “complete man” and his position among the writers of his time. However, such contextual elements are scarce in the outline, which privileges the description of each writer’s poetry, though not solely its formal characteristics, the “mental outlook” of Spenser in The Faerie Queene, and genre groupings, with names of poets attached to them: the lyric, the pastoral, sonnet cycles, the didactic, and so on. It is also interesting to note that this minimal, compulsory list of topics is followed by a menu of two subjects, between which Frye intended to choose “if there is more time.” Either he would dwell longer on the formal and thematic study of Donne’s poetry, or he would develop, first, the intellectual presuppositions of sixteenth-century thought through Plato, Augustine, Calvin, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and even cynical and pessimistic tendencies, and, second, Renaissance ideals, including medieval and Gothic ones still held in Elizabethan England. Thus, while helping undergraduate students to begin to understand how Renaissance poetry was born, Frye structured his course according to the requirements of the poetic system itself; and if this were to be called history, it would be strictly that of the unfolding of the genre, with very few biographical or contextual elements intervening. Notebook 39 was to serve two purposes: right-hand pages were to be used as lecture notes, and left-hand pages as material for “the book.” Clearly that book, which was to have been a sequential, chronologically ordered history of English Renaissance poetry, was never written as such; and this exemplifies Frye’s gradual but energetic departure from

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a merely chronological ordering towards a multidimensional vision of English poetry within English literature as a whole and within the literature of the world, as unveiled in the Anatomy of Criticism. All concepts basic to Frye’s critical theory deal, in one way or another, with temporal becoming. The case of the five fictional modes with their respective types of protagonists is perhaps the most obvious: “Looking over this table, we can see that European fiction, during the last fifteen centuries, has steadily moved its center of gravity down the list” (Anatomy, 34). Other sequences are of course possible in a world perspective, but given Frye’s premises, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which the mythical would not have anteriority over the literary. In fact, the identification of the mythical and of the literary on Frye’s terms rests upon that anteriority, and seems irreversible. Anteriority, it is true, can be logical rather than temporal, but the process of displacement whereby myth is transformed into literature necessarily occurs in time. Drawing its structural unity from its mythical origins, the infinite diversification of literature in the world develops as a history: “The conventions, genres and archetypes of literature do not simply appear: they must develop historically from origins or perhaps a common origin” (Critical Path, 34). It is, furthermore, a historicity specific to literature itself: “I wanted a historical approach to literature, but an approach that would be or include a genuine history of literature, and not simply the assimilating of literature to some other kinds of history” (23). It is this specific literary historicity that forms part of the framework of critical activity: “Instead of fitting literature into a prefabricated scheme of history, the critic should see literature as a coherent structure, historically conditioned but shaping its own history … This total body of literature can be studied through its larger structural principles” (24). Clearly, this vision encompasses existing historical studies that respect the specificity of literature, as well as a variety of possible future historical studies written in a similar spirit. In other words, the historical aspect of Frye’s thought does not disqualify or destroy literary history as a mode of intellectual discourse but sets out for it certain theoretical standards governing inclusions and exclusions. Above all, it demands coherence of inquiry. The coherence of the inquiry presupposes coherence of the literary system itself – that is, the kind of spatio-temporal interrelatedness that Frye devises for it. Literary works are studied independently from their origins and their original settings: “Nearly every work of art in the past had a social function in its own time … It may have been originally made for use rather than pleasure, and so fall outside the general Aristotelian conception of art, but if it now exists for our pleasure it is what

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we call art” (Anatomy, 344–5). Like Todorov in Les Genres du discours, Frye sees genres initially identified with the speech acts that gave them birth. Moving away from these original contexts and functions, literary works enter into their own history, in which their functions relate only to the functions of other literary works, in the time of their reception: “One of the tasks of criticism is that of the recovery of function, not of course the restoration of an original function, but the recreation of a new function in a new context” (345). We might remember, for example, that postcolonial readings of The Tempest are now themselves part of our cultural history. Similarly, every new appropriation makes cultural history in its own time and place; the life of the literary work continues to make history: The culture of the past is not only the memory of mankind, but our own buried life, and the study of it leads to a recognition scene, a discovery in which we see, not our past lives, but the total cultural form of our present life. It is not only the poet but his reader who is subject to the obligation to “make it new.” Without this sense of “repetition” [in the Kierkegaardian sense] historical criticism tends to remove the products of culture from our own sphere of interest. (Anatomy, 346)

Our understanding of Frye’s concept of historicity would be distorted were we to neglect the underlying link between literature as history and the manner in which the present responds to history. By definition, the literary system moves forward in time to receive new creations. But to say this is still to describe it in mechanical terms, which would totally betray Frye’s sense of the role of literature in society and the role of the reader in giving life to the literary work. It would not be an exaggeration to say that literature enters history precisely inasmuch as it becomes literature; the process of its creative severance from its original circumstantial history strangely resembles its creative severance from truth claims and ideologies, a severance without which it could not add new dimensions, new visions, new riches to the history of mankind.

works cited Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957. – The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1971. – The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1976.

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– The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1982. Hamilton, A.C. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes tropiques. Paris: Librairie Plon 1955. Todorov, Tzvetan. Les Genres du discours. Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1978.

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23 The Social Thought of Northrop Frye

More, perhaps, than any other contemporary thinker, Northrop Frye has made us reflect upon culture in general and Canadian culture in particular. Undoubtedly, the Anatomy of Criticism innovated, in 1957, by its manner of articulating the literary system as well as its reflection upon the literary system. Yet if we follow Frye’s thought all the way, we begin to perceive how it links the understanding of literature with an even more fundamental quest for intelligibility. The Anatomy begins by magnificently establishing the specificity of the literary pursuit, in terms both of literary works and of the critical and theoretical study of literature. Frye’s resolve is crystal-clear: it aims at characterizing literary works as verbal structures forming sequences among themselves and ultimately forming a whole literary system. Though foreshadowed by Czech structuralism and Russian formalism, this attitude was certainly a revolutionary one as far as Canadian readership was concerned, and Frye carefully anticipates the inevitable question of the social function that literature can – or cannot – perform given this conquest of – shall we call it autonomy? – among human activities. A careful reading of the “Polemical Introduction”

Paper read at the International Conference on Northrop Frye in China, Peking University, July 1994. Published (in Chinese) in Journal of Peking University (1995/3): 105–110, and in Feilai yoniu: Zhongguo yu Xifang (Studies on Northrop Frye: China and the West), ed. Wang Ning and Xu Yehong (Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 1995), 58–68.

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shows that it is not only the question asked by the potential reader steeped in social concern; it is, very importantly, Frye’s own question as well. Yes, the critic dwells “in a conceptual universe of his own” (12). But Frye’s purpose is not to isolate him from the rest of the human and humanistic enterprise, only – if it is true that “literature is the central division of the humanities, flanked on one side by history and on the other by philosophy” (12) – to describe the special character of what the critic does. And that, among many other things, consists in clearing away all kinds of determinisms that place the literary work in a causal relationship with social factors. At the end of the book Frye returns to the topic of the relationship between the literary work and society by showing that the literary work tends to lose the function it originally fulfilled within its society. He says this, however, not in order to deny that original link but to affirm that criticism can recreate it in a new context. In other words, the emphases of the Anatomy do not create a literature/society dichotomy but immeasurably enlarge the function of literature in human life, as well as the function of the critic in human life and therefore in society. This link, however, is mostly implicit, and given the nature of the inquiry, it need not be anything but implicit. Explicitly it is stated at the end of the Anatomy that there is a plurality of intellectual languages, that none of them can quite make it as a superlanguage (Frye’s reactions to the claims of semiotics as being that superlanguage should be studied separately), and that “in the meantime we have a plurality of languages” (354), with the result that “if critics go on with their own business, this” – he is referring to repairing the broken links between creation and knowledge, art and science, myth and concept, in other words links between the imaginary and the real – “will appear to be, with increasing obviousness, the social and practical result of their labours” (354). Let us seek out, and very briefly analyze, that less obviously articulated aspect of Frye’s philosophy of literature and culture that relates to its social linkages. Not unlike some of the Nouveaux critiques of France and Switzerland, whose contemporary he was by dint of the Anatomy, Frye primarily emphasized the specificity of literature and of literary criticism to the point where they would appear autonomous – although he himself does not appear addicted to the use of the word “autonomy,” since in culture as in life no activity can be regarded as absolutely autonomous. But what he autonomized for the necessary purposes of his argument came to be regarded as somehow detached from any thought whatsoever about the social responsibility of the critic and theorist. In my view it would be much truer to Frye and to our discipline in general to shed some light on the unlit side of the coin, the critic’s exercise of social responsibility precisely by exploring

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the realms of imagination, the functioning and the products of imagination within culture. It may not be the most popular stance – but let us take that risk – to say that all literary and cultural theory is developed within and for the sake of human persons, whether viewed collectively as society or singly as individual subjects. Did Frye himself not point out that “in a modern democracy a citizen participates in society mainly through his imagination” (Stubborn, 104), which means, among other things, that teaching of and reflection upon literature are indeed eminently social activities, conferring “not only a means of understanding, but a power to fight” (Stubborn, 105)? Theory is a moment of theoretical reflection that complements practice. This might seem obvious yet is not always to scholars who dichotomize reading of texts and reflection upon that activity, as if theorizing were in some way opposed to studying literary texts. At a literary theory conference in the United States in the early eighties, I once experienced a kind of intuition of what was happening around me and why theory was so much part of life. I was surrounded by young American theorists who were all busy unmaking hierarchies and turning margins into centres and centres into margins. That was their way of being radical. I had been slow in realizing what suddenly became clear to me: that theory can be a form of social protest. It might be objected that, being of the generation next to Frye’s, these young intellectuals were reacting, among other things, if not precisely to Frye, at least to the kind of holistic vision that he proposes; yet he, in the fifties, may well have been underpinning the Anatomy (and I would contend that he was) with a solid conviction that its emphases, including and perhaps especially on the unmaking of social determinisms, embodied his way of being socially responsible. Again let us remember the conclusion of the Anatomy, quoted above. Once this perspective is admitted, the figure of Frye, in its very complexity, appears more cogent. One often hears about Frye’s membership in the ccf, Canada’s earlier version of a social democratic party, and its successor, the New Democratic Party, and even of his persistent loyalty to the United Church of Canada, as if these facts were somehow detached from Frye the critic and cultural philosopher. My view is that they are part of a continuum. At any rate, the co-presence of social conscience and simultaneous belief in the specificity of literature by no means constitute the only paradox in the Frye phenomenon. Another, not unrelated paradox would be Frye’s obvious respect for the subject, coupled with his belief in the self-fulfilment of the subject within culture. Concurrently, “the myth of concern” persists in Frye as the haunting obverse of the literary myth. Let us focus on three points: the contin-

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ued presence of the myth of concern; Frye’s social criticism as integral part of his vision; and, perhaps, a positive if not necessarily didactic legacy. In raising these points I am not unmindful of the discomforts of those – and this means all of us at times – who feel that aesthetic pleasure must in some fashion account for itself in moral terms. Marxism is a case in point. Often the discomforts come from inability to integrate the moment of aesthetic reflection and indeed aesthetic pleasure itself within a socially accountable system of thought without violating the aesthetic. Aesthetically, More’s Utopia was a very ugly place; the early Marxist “reflection” theory of literature and art, and all its sequels in the various socialist systems, starting let us say with the Soviet novel of the twenties, are aesthetic sins. Frye, on the contrary, makes literature and art, as well as the study of literature and art, part of common daily life. Let us for the moment leave out discussion of whether they belong to elite or less than elite culture and return to the functionality of aesthetic experience along with what we might call cultural reflection. The former, in nowadays widely admitted Bakthinian terms, might be easier to justify to the public at large than the latter. In the essay entitled “Expanding Eyes” Frye reflects upon the possible social impact of the humanistic disciplines: The real function of literary scholarship and criticism is so little understood, even by those who practise it, that it is hard not to think of it, even yet, as somehow sub-creative, in contrast to the “creative” writing of poems and novels, as though creativity were an attribute of those genres rather than of the people using them. Part of the problem is the narrowness of the academic set-up. To take an analogy from philosophy: no one doubts that it is necessary to produce commentaries, explications and reinterpetations of the great philosophers of the past, or to study the history of philosophy. But if there were nothing else clearly visible in academic departments of philosophy, one might well ask, where is actual philosophy still being carried on? The corresponding question for literary scholars is: what is the real activity that Samuel Johnson and Coleridge and Matthew Arnold were concerned with? Asked who the influential thinkers of our time are, a literary critic might find it difficult, not merely to name a literary scholar whom he could regard as a leading thinker, in the sense of having influenced anyone outside his immediate field, but even to conceive the possibility of any literary critic’s having so central a place in modern thought at all. (Spiritus, 105)

Here we have at least two competing criteria for the social function of the critic. The first concerns creativity. The adjective “creative” is accompanied by quotation marks, which make it obvious that Frye does

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not think that the creativity of the poet is greater than that of the critic or philosopher; it is simply different. The other criterion leads us into a detour – at least it is logically a detour, but there is reason to think that to Frye it was central – namely, the criterion of distinction among scholars. Here Frye deals with distinction in terms of popularity, reflecting on how difficult it is for any literary critic – probably including himself – to make a mark upon the society of his time and thus to exert a social impact. Gradually Frye lost any shyness about designating himself as the leading critic. There is a notation of 30 August 1988 in his last notebook that says: “It does not matter how often I am mentioned by other critics: I form part of the subtext of every critic worth reading.” As well, two other posthumous texts assert not only his own primacy among critics but his exceptional status as a genius. The least that can be said here is that Frye’s view of social responsibility is not unrelated to social impact and that the more outstanding the critic or thinker, the greater his or her social impact. That still leaves open the question where this impact can lead, and I suspect that like great writers, great thinkers just are, any attempt at evaluating them morally notwithstanding. Not that Frye does not care about ethics, far from it; but for him systems of thought, like scientific systems, primarily serve the synthesizing of knowledge, and interpretation; their users may of course deal with them ethically or unethically as the case may be. Art itself is intensely social because of its effects on its readers or spectators. A poem, let us say, is made out of both conscious and unconscious materials: the unconscious is something that nobody short of a bodhisatva can control, but in certain mental places it can find its own mode of expression. When it does so, it forms a kind of transformer of mental power, sending its voltage into its readers until, as Blake says, the expanding eyes of man behold the depth of wondrous worlds. (Spiritus, 121–2)

This may be a privileged experience, a unique moment of intense enlightenment; and it certainly was for Frye vis-à-vis Blake. But it has an essential and necessary place in human art in general (which by the same token would almost automatically mean that teachers and interpeters of art also have a place). “It would be better,” continues Frye, to think of the arts as, like physical exercise, a primary human need that has been smothered under false priorities. If we look at any culture that has reduced its standard of living to the barest essentials, like that of the Eskimos [obviously this was written before the expression “Inuit” came to replace

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“Eskimo”] we see at once how poetry leaps into the foreground as one of those essentials […] One might start drawing morals here about what kind of society we should reconstruct or return to in order to achieve such simplicity, but most of them would be pretty silly. I merely stress the possibility, importance and genuineness of a response to the arts in which we can no longer separate that response from our social context and personal commitments. (Spiritus, 121)

Thus, poetry among other forms of art, but especially poetry as the summit of verbal art, has a place within human life that is worth retrieving even for non-literary publics (which in turn implies educating the public on the one hand and, on the other, enlarging the scope of what may be regarded as poetry). Let us also note that Frye mentions the possibility of speculating about the reconstruction and transformation of society but stops short of actually designing that society. This is typical of the form in which he expressed his social concerns: descriptions of past civilizations and cultures, broad critical analyses of what exists now, and very little by way of blueprints for the future. In this sense Frye knows who he is and we know it too: an analyst, synthesizer, philosopher of cultural processes, not a reformer of society. However, we should not underestimate, as we ponder the potential contribution of Frye to changing societies in a changing world, the positive value of such analyses, since quite often they indicate possible future directions as well as directions to avoid. In the case just mentioned, for example, the quality of simplicity in poetry and in life may be part of a superseded pastoral dream but it may well, at the same time, be in line with a brand new and very Canadian impulse to bring human life into better harmony with its environment in nature. Let us briefly return to the three aspects that conjointly would contribute to an understanding of the social philosophy that underpins the sovereignty of the cultural in Frye’s thought. First, the myth of concern. I am tempted to say that the myth of concern as outlined in The Critical Path is the obverse of Frye’s own theory of myth. It is an ideological monster that appropriates everything crossing its path in a given society, including whatever in a culture might aspire to be free and disinterested, even its own literary mythoi: The myth of concern exists to hold society together, so far as words can help to do this. For it, truth and reality are not directly connected with reasoning or evidence, but are socially established. What is true, for concern, is what society believes and does in response to authority, and a belief, insofar as a belief is verbalized, is a statement of willingness to participate in a myth of concern. (36)

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Myths of concern typically speak the language of belief; gradually they develop social, political, legal, and literary accretions and tend to generate a kind of crowning religion central to them, and useful in acquiring ultimate security for their believers. Also, myths of concern are anxious and defensive as well as conservative. A literature taken over by or arising from a myth of concern will be impregnated by that conservatism and characterized by repetitiveness. At this point one might be tempted to interpret Frye as thoroughly demonizing the myth of concern. But let us remember that he does not favour value judgments, or at least a priori value judgments. His purpose is to describe the functions as well as the inherent dangers of the myth of concern; that this description contains a warning is for the reader to understand. In a writing as opposed to an oral culture the individual subject expresses his/her own adherence to beliefs, but can also oppose prevailing beliefs and ultimately oppose society, stay away, be alone; thus a culture will harbour within itself little islands that to some extent have distanced themselves from it. There also grows the possibility of liberated judgment and of what Frye calls the myth of freedom, which arises antithetically within the myth of concern, out of the social conscience of the individual whose view of truth and reality diverges from that of the myth of concern. The following quotation can be viewed not only as a statement of systematic recurrence, or even a law that Frye is uttering, but, in the end, as the echo of a personal preference: The socially critical attitudes, which perceive hypocrisy, corruption, failure to meet standards, gaps between the real and the ideal, and the like, are antiritualistic, and cannot attract much social notice without the support of their one powerful ally, the truth of correspondence revealed through reason and evidence. The myth of freedom thus constitutes the “liberal” element in society, as the myth of concern constitutes the conservative one, and those who hold it are unlikely to form a much larger group than a critical, and usually an educated, minority. To form the community as a whole is not the function of the myth of freedom: it has to find its place in, and come to terms with, the society of which it forms a part. (45)

This is essential: though the myth of freedom is as functional as the myth of concern, its function consists in being evanescent, fragile, even a bit disorganized and often “parasitic.” One might detect some sympathy here for the kind of liberalizing movement whose character also coincides with the independence, always to be encouraged, of the individual mind and of its formation. Ultimately, the desirability of freedom to protest is one of the countless possible, if not always real

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implications of the words so uniquely important to Frye: “The truth shall make you free.” However, the myth of concern is inseparable from the social order; the myth of freedom can transform the human qualities of the myth of concern but cannot totally eradicate it. As for the community that would reconcile the social necessities of the myth of concern with the social virtues of the myth of freedom, it is only virtually present; Frye does not define it in a positive manner, lest it begin to coalesce with the myth of concern. A second aspect of Frye’s social philosophy might be sought among his views as a social critic; without listing them or systematizing their commonalities, all the less since Frye’s social and indeed political comments are frequently intertwined with his statements about culture, we can consider indicative examples, such as the essay “City of the End of Things,” which forms the first chapter of The Modern Century and was written in the centennial year of the confederation. Appropriately, given the occasion, Frye reflects upon the implications of nationhood, only to assert that “we are moving towards a post-national world, and … Canada has moved further in that direction than most of the smaller nations” (17). He credits Canada with having avoided both the tensions that in the emergent nations have too abruptly opposed federalism and separatism, middle-class and working-class interests, xenophobia and adjustment to the larger world; and “the kind of chaos and the violence that goes with the development of a vast imperial complex like the usa or the ussr” (17). So far, Canada – let us not forget that this was written in 1967 – has been able to avoid such extremes and to keep a “sense of proportion” adapted to the postnational world that is coming. Frye never quite ceased to believe that the confederation would in some way survive and thus continue to defeat obsolete nationalisms within itself. The other opportunity Canadians have (and share with other Western nations) is that of cultural self-awareness: they can “struggle for an active and conscious relation to their time” (18) and build their life accordingly; or they can be passive consumers of the media. The difference between these two attitudes underlies Frye’s entire treatment of cultural development in this essay. His preference for active and knowledgeable participation in one’s culture hardly needs demonstrating. Our object here being to encounter Frye the social critic, we need to concentrate on the nature, causes, and effects of the widely predominant negative attitude of which he disapproves. In doing so we must be attentive both to that which, in culture, dulls individual response and to the individual thus affected, but most especially to the relationship between these two. For, although culture – or so say the anthropologists – lives independently of any one subject, and in many ways

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constitutes that subject, by the same token it needs the subject to experience it and make it real. In the “modern century” psychological alienation has set in, paving the way for passiveness of response, whereby subjects are discouraged from resisting such ready-made versions of reality as advertising or propaganda or mass-produced literature impose upon them; they may think they are abreast of world events and even see themselves as critical participants in the process, but that, according to Frye’s analysis, is just another example of the illusion that blinds them. Come to think of it, the central image Frye uses in this essay is the antitype, to use his own terminology, of Plato’s allegory of the cave: What eventually happens I may describe in a figure borrowed from those interminable railway journeys that are so familiar to Canadians, at least of my generation. As one’s eyes are passively pulled along a rapidly moving landscape, it turns darker and one begins to realize that many of the objects that appear to be outside are actually reflections of what is in the carriage. As it becomes entirely dark one enters a narcissistic world, where, except for a few lights here and there, we can only see the reflection of where we are. (27–8)

It is revealing that Frye considers no one exempt from the power of illusion, since all one can do is remain aware of that power. At the limit it might be said that it is difficult to consider the two attitudes mentioned above to be completely separate, since even the self-aware individual must perpetually struggle to keep away illusion. That progress itself, which has become mere progression – that is, acceleration of processes – has proved illusory is surely not a thought unique to Frye, nor is the deterioration of the city, nor finally the impersonality of the media. It is by maintaining a critical – that is, ultimately, liberating – view of social motive that Frye differentiates himself from much of the current anthropology of culture. For example, he agrees with Innis that the human will can and does direct media of communication, and insists that “no improvement in the human situation can take place independently of the human will to improve” and that “confidence in automatic or impersonal improvement is always misplaced” (41). Cultural self-awareness clears away illusion, but demystification is not its sole aim. Rather, it is a means to an end that is freedom. But what is the use of freedom in a society so bent upon imposing uniformity? The answer to this question also supplies at least a partial explanation of Frye’s obsession with the ubiquity of culture: namely, that freedom can only come from the subject’s creative resistance to that

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which, in culture, tends to impose uniformity and stifle imagination. Thus, far from being merely the reserved domain of the cultural critic, the imaginary is every person’s pathway to a life worth living. At this point we are in the process of crossing the uncertain dividing line between our second point – a few elements of Frye’s social criticism – and our third, which is merely a question: does Frye propound a social philosophy of his own? It seems to me that he does not, if by social philosophy we mean an explicitly constructed and predictably normative doctrine concerning the relationships between the individual and society. Positive pronouncements are rarer on his part than critical ones; the former tend to follow upon the latter. Such is precisely the case in his last public pronouncement, a lecture entitled “The Cultural Development of Canada.” In it he rapidly takes stock of the historical situation of Canada, maintaining that what impoverished the confederation of 1867 is also what ruined Meech Lake: lack of cultural communication, that is, of understanding and taking into account the expectation of the other. Increasingly, the various groupings within Canada, not only French and English Canadians but the First Nations and any number of immigrant ethnic groups, are becoming more rather than less aware of themselves and their own identities. “Reconfederation” can only be a political act, but only culture will be the locus of sharing a lifestyle, a history, a heritage, creative arts. If education could open all minds to all others, and if multiculturalism were experienced and managed as complementariness, then reconfederation could happen, and Frye’s trajectory from critical analysis to positive concept would accompany us into a reality without illusion. Illusion has its place in the world of imagination, into which human beings project their quest for reality. It is the osmosis of the two worlds that Frye addresses in his last book, The Double Vision. Ultimately the symbolical and spiritual cannot be divorced from the social: the human person is one. It is each human being’s access to the symbolical vision that transforms reality, and makes us free. Societies have the power to facilitate that freedom or to impede it. They differ in their state of maturity; paradoxically, it is those that are based on myths of concern and most passionately proclaim themselves creators of freedom that can most spectacularly fail in the acquisition of freedom. Thus, Frye’s commitment to social responsibility consists in maintaining a dialectical tension between symbolical vision and concrete reality, for social philosophy and critical theory both are in the end mere tools for working towards at least a measure of participation in the life of spirit for all people.

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works cited Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957. – The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press 1967. – The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1970. – The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1971. – Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1976.

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part five Comparative Imaginings

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24 Liberating Children’s Imagination

Fictionality, whether intended for children or adults, by multiplying possible worlds has a liberating effect, but also works better than the didactic imposition of moral lessons; this is no more than a restatement of Horace’s still valid conjoining of the pleasant and the useful. It is now a commonly accepted fact that the development of feminist readings, by dint of providing different appropriations of literary texts than those that have long been taken for granted, have had a strong impact upon the theory of literature in general, since it became apparent that if reception and interpretation will vary with the gender of the reading subject, other factors may contribute to the transformation of the text as well. We are all acutely aware of the fact that cultural identity engenders another set of such factors. Thus we have learned how to gain a new understanding of fictional texts through the eyes of different readers, how to construct new histories and new interpretations based on difference, and as women’s writing has become more selfaware in its search for new paths, so have gay writing and the writing of cultures striving to establish their identities. What about the case of the developing personality? Obviously children have not contributed, cannot contribute the kind of obverse field of writing whereby women as writers have helped to make their role as readers better known, though sporadically, and fascinatingly, child creation does exist. At any rate,

Keynote address at the Congress of the International Federation of Modern Languages and Literatures, Regensburg, Aug. 1997.

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there has been much endeavour to take into account the child reader. As a result we can safely say that attention is being paid to the need of any subject, whether adult or child, to appropriate the text, to rejoin through imagination the strategy of the text. The child is particularly predisposed to freedom of imagination. It has not yet posed firm frontiers between so-called reality and so-called fiction. The child, especially the small child, readily identifies with fictional characters and situations, participates in fictive action, enjoys imaginative verbal devices. It is indeed a privileged reader. Why, then, insist on liberating those already liberated? My purpose is to sketch out the privileges but also the responsibilities of literary studies in this field. The study of Kid’s Lit has benefited from and contributed to the general movement of transformation in literary studies. It has experienced with narratology the kinship of the folk-tale and of the tale for children. It has received from literary sociology the ability to survey child readership, from sociocriticism the ability to detect the social implicit within literary structures, from Rezeptionsästhetik the ability to bring together reader expectation and formal realization historically, from empirical studies the ability to test child-reader responses. Through the evolution of theoretical thinking about literature in general it has received droit de cité within literary studies because children’s literature has theoretically and institutionally widened the fields. It is also an excellent example for collaboration of literary and cultural studies because of its peculiar kind of breadth and unbridled universality. It is not hampered by metafictions. It has unlimited intercultural potential, yet none of this prevents – on the contrary, it has powerfully sustained – the construction of a poetics of children’s literature and the understanding of its role in the specifically literary system and in the polysystem. Still, no field of literature is so fraught with dangers of subversion as is children’s literature; thus an immense weight of responsibility rests upon this sector of literary studies. The freedom of the childish imagination can be robbed of its formative potential, whether intentionally or not. Folktales, children’s stories, can be and have been ideologically exploited. Even apart from such wilful exploitation our attention is drawn to the countless implicit messages that in the collective unconscious of a culture will affect the mind of the young subject. The awareness of this power has given teachers and writers the desire to produce more “politically correct,” more healing, more therapeutic material, respectful of the child’s vulnerability. But the question then arises: is this cleaned-up world truly that of the child? Much research seems to point to fictionality itself as a major factor of liberation and empowerment. It is interesting to note, for example, that in France a critic such

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as Marc Soriano joined hands with children’s librarians and teachers of toddlers to demand the production of a literature that is no longer the typical “littérature d’instituteurs” of the entre-deux-guerres (see Perrot, 331). That demand has found a response in that at least in the so-called developed world there has been a quantitative explosion of children’s literature. Countries used to have a limited corpus transmitted from generation to generation. No longer so: vast numbers of books for children of all ages with all sorts of approaches on all sorts of topics vie for attention and for the parents’ pocketbook. Amidst this multiplication of opportunities, the book competes for the child’s attention with other media, a tough competition because the other media are less work-intensive for the young consumer. This calls for unprecedented selectiveness on the market, where there is at least hope that creative appeal to the imagination can be a foremost criterion. A “pédagogie de l’imaginaire” has been developing, described by Georges Jean among others. It could be, but is not merely, an outgrowth of the fanciful seventies. Rather, it proceeds from a philosophical stance, namely that “l’imaginaire est une faculté majeure dans la mesure où elle assure et construit la cohérence de l’être” (12); it deconstructs the monotony of habit; it incites creative dépassement, reaching out beyond oneself; it also claims as its own Sartre’s thought according to which “l’imaginaire représente à chaque instant le sens implicite du réel,” and implicitly seems to adhere, as well, to the concept of poetry as incandescent reason, “poésie, raison ardente,” dear to the poet Pierre Emmanuel, who inspired Georges Jean’s book. It also proceeds from a perception that imagination has been deadened, that education is not doing much to revive it, as if imagining were not an indispensable, privileged mode of understanding, basic to all human activity. Children respond to nonsense verse, to the absurd, to magic in words, rather than to their rational meaning. “Chez le jeune enfant, l’imagination est étroitement liée au langage, et le langage à l’imagination” (Jean, 58). Thus the importance of literature as the art of the word is underscored. Nor should it be forgotten that the child stakes out and imagines its own self in relation to father, mother, siblings, outer world, while its self becomes the inner refuge that is also the locus of reflection upon stories, and this is basically our problem: this refuge can lead to inner freedom, or to imprisonment. Isaac Bashevis said that the story-teller of our time must be “an entertainer of the spirit”; he must “intrigue the reader, uplift his spirit, give him the joy and the escape that true art always grants” (3). But simultaneously Singer asserts that “the serious writer of our time must be deeply concerned about the

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problems of his generation.” This translates into the following ironical declaration, “Why I write for children”; there are five hundred reasons, but he will mention ten: “Children read books, not reviews. They don’t give a hoot about the critics. Children don’t read to find their identity.” (I do not think that Bashevis denies the importance of searching for identity, on the contrary. But the child’s own desire should motivate it.) Children “don’t read to free themselves of guilt, to quench their thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology. They detest sociology” (13). Of course. But again, the desirable objectives should be foremost, and the undesirable phenomena psychologists and sociologists observe should recede while the child is having fun reading! Singer’s last five reasons all spell simplicity and basic values: children “don’t try to understand Kafka or Finnegan’s Wake. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff” (14). (Bashevis may be wrong at least about punctuation!) But he is supremely observant when he says: “They love interesting stories, not commentary, guides, or footnotes. When a book is boring, they yawn openly … They don’t expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.” The relationship between text and illustration is crucial to liberating the imagination. Of course, if the writer’s attitude is didactic and he or she intends to use pictures solely as a means to make the text more communicable, to make the child grasp and digest it more quickly, pictorial art will be subservient and, chances are, uninspiring. The illustrator must have freeedom to interpret so that the child itself may dream creatively about the pictures, and go from story to picture and vice-versa. How symbolical of our subject is St Exupéry’s Little Prince! The mysterious child asks the stranded pilot: “If you please – draw me a sheep,” and the pilot starts by painstakingly drawing animals that try to look like sheep but do not please the little Prince, and finally draws a box which forces him to imagine the sheep inside. The child is delighted: “That is exactly the way I wanted it,” he exclaims. And this supplies us with the ideal metaphor of the role and function of the imagination in expanding one’s world, overcoming obstacles in thought until they can be overcome in reality, bringing the world into one’s field of vision. But let me beware of my own musings on the subject. Specialists of children’s literature have set themselves specific questions and devised experiments to see how illustration works with child readers in relation to the text. Some time ago Dr Jacqueline Danset-Léger described in her book L’Enfant et les images de la littérature enfantine what has been

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done to go beyond the general awareness that, with the small child at any rate, illustration comes first; that you have to know much about children’s psychology to devise books for them, as Paul Faucher, the original Père Castor, began to do and as Piaget embodied in the first scientifically designed publication (1971) in which every single element, idea, image had been tested for child reception. It was called “Comment la souris reçoit une pierre sur la tête et découvre le monde.” Danset-Léger tries to probe the unanalysable, that which goes beyond the scientific literature on the subject; she speaks of “le livre d’images, instrument privilégié d’éveil” (202); of the development of sensibility, too often suppresssed or censored; she reminds us of Berlyne’s studies on the physiological basis of aesthetic pleasure; of the development of self-expression, communication, dialogue with other children and with adults. She mentions the power of expression of the image, which goes beyond that of the word. The image will attract the child to reading; readers who as children have owned picture albums become more faithful readers. She notes a near-contest situation between the primacy of the image and of language as described by Barthes. And she warns that too much emphasis on the picture may lead the child away from reading, whereas it should be a gate to the empowerment of reading. Reading should not be simply a mode of initiation to adult categories but an experience sui generis, which alone can be liberating. Jean Perrot went to the heart of the matter, along with his collaborators, in Jeux graphiques dans l’album pour la jeunesse. There is the secret: it is the playfulness of the album images that exercises the child’s mind in virtuality. Boldly, Perrot indulges in a play on words, entitling his introductory remarks “Jouer Descartes” – the meeting of which the book presents the proceedings took place on Descartes Street, and there is of course a reference to card games as well as to the name of the philosopher who is supposed to have taught us how our minds function but who, according to Perrot, and many other researchers for that matter, has been misinterpreted in that his references to play, to playful experimentation, to games and sports as sources of imaginative examples have not been systematically linked with his method and his epistemology. Descartes does use the imagination, to the benefit of the scientific method. The interplay of margin and centre, of picture and text, inventiveness in materials, innovation in book materials, shapes (the wheel-shaped book, the pop-up book), books embodying trains, books playing on colours and engaging the child to do so, are examples. Jean Perrot has reminded us that play, notably play between children and adults, reconstructs the world through surprise effects and what may sometimes appear as pure, unadulterated silliness, “goofing off,” as

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American slang has it. Perrot sees the learning of reading, and especially the first approach to the potentially forbidding object that is the book, as a playful process that even invites bits and pieces of taboo behaviour – physical aggressiveness, rude words – that encourages the vicarious experience of adventure. The paths for liberating the imagination are numerous. Humour is among the foremost. In their compendium entitled Le Récit d’enfance: Enfance et écriture Denise Escarpit and Bernadette Poulou make generous room for it, especially as regards the role of humour in the quest of cultural identity. Azouz Begag develops this theme in the case of the Beur novel. Humour, he says, often originates in the ghetto and in the slum. It is a safety-valve for passion and hate, a social regulator. It is also, for the immigrant in a new country, a cultural passport allowing him or her to jump some hurdles by showing a light touch on heavy subjects. Begag speaks of the fact that, following Moslem rules, his hero’s father forbade Christmas trees. Béni, the young hero, demands an “Arabe de Noël” (193)! In Alligator Pie the Canadian Dennis Lee defuses the gravity of place-names and weaves them into a feast of uncanny, nonsensical sound effects: “In Kamloops / I’ll eat your boots. In the Gatineaus / I’ll eat your toes. In Napanee / I’ll eat your knee. In Winnipeg / I’ll eat your leg. In Charlottetown / I’ll eat your gown … In Aklavik / I’ll eat your neck … And I’ll eat your nose / And I’ll eat your toes / In Medicine Hat and / Moose Jaw” (17). Feigned participation in the movement or action narrated in the text can also stimulate and channel the child’s imagination. This can occur, for example, with the Thursday Boat by Canada’s very popular Robert Munsch. The strategy of the text connives with the child’s enjoyment of the giant’s aggressive behaviour towards God, whom he wants to provoke to a fight, threatening to reduce Him to applesauce. In the end, unexpectedly and quietly, God arrives in the form of a little girl. But until that happens, the child can zero in on the noisy crescendo of mutual provocations. As a story-teller Munsch actually experiments with child audiences before giving a story its final form. We can regard his text as a kind of live, extended experiment. But creative self-projection can go much further in making the self at home in other worlds until these become one world. Another Canadian story, Masai and I by Virginia Kroll, embodies the imaginary travels, back and forth, of a Canadian child of African descent. On the left-hand side she is shown engaging in activities of everyday life as a middle-class Canadian child; on the right-hand page she is a Masai, living the village life of the Masai, closer to nature and to the community, closer to her roots. Thanks to this expansion of the imaginary field, the identity-alterity tension becomes a pleasant, even joyful process of discovery.

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The imagination also impels the child to greater intellectual and moral achievement by enabling it to identify with inspiring rolemodels. Here, of course, examples are legion. Let me arbitrarily single out the Russian folk-tale with its multitudes of legendary beings ranging from the most beautiful princesses, the most fearful giants, extraordinarily powerful and ill-intentioned witches, to very selfish or totally selfless humans. In the tale of the Petrified Kingdom a conscientious soldier persecuted by his superiors escapes and enters into the service of a foreign king whom he serves well, until another mishap makes him run away once again: he shot in the wing a bird that was destroying the king’s garden. Fleeing, he reaches a city where everything is petrified. He is met by a princess who informs him that the bird he wounded was her sister, a terrible sorceress who turned all people to stone. If the soldier could live courageously, without flinching, through three terrifying attacks, all would be liberated. This is of course what happens; the soldier becomes king, and despite the neutral tone of the story the reader begins to understand the values of personal merit, strong discipline, unwavering fidelity, boundless courage. Thus an unhappy or underprivileged child could intuit that such qualities lead to success. In a different manner, Andersen’s Ugly Duckling underscores the potential of every human self for full, even radiant development. Senator Landon Pearson, one of the initiators of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, published in 1991 a book entitled Children of Glasnost, an in-depth study about children’s literature, writers, and reading habits in the former Soviet Union. She found great riches in both texts and illustration and, considering the political context, a remarkably high level of opportunity for children to read the best in Russian and world literature for their age. Also, teachers paid careful attention to the development of children’s imagination and their own understanding (as opposed to more rigid adult explanations). “Literature can and does influence children’s behaviour in an indirect way” (Pearson, 364). Landon Pearson firmly believes that free access to a diversity of excellent fiction had much to do with the participation of Russian youth in the liberation movement some years ago. The child’s imagination can also receive liberating effects from fiction when the child faces the trauma of illness, death, violence, catastrophe. This is a topic to be approached with great care. Although Northrop Frye rightly considers fiction therapeutic for the psyche in a general way, to even suggest that a traumatized child will automatically or easily emerge from its condition on the wings of literary imagination would be naïve. Yet the right story at the right time may help the child to identify with the fate of another, feel understood, mitigate its

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solitude, suggest ways out of unthinkable situations. A good example is Roberto Innocenti’s Rose Blanche, situated in an unnamed country of Europe beset by a dictatorship in a not too remote past. (Though there are many indications that it is a Holocaust story, Germany is not named; and since there have been such situations in other countries, any child reader anywhere can imagine perpetrators and victims in contexts with which it is familiar or of which it is informed.) Trucks are taking children behind barbed wires. A little girl named Rose Blanche follows their tracks and begins to bring food in secret to the starving children. On the day the internment camp is about to be dismantled there is confusion, and a guard shoots Rose Blanche. The story is told soberly, in a quasi-neutral tone, letting the child reader guess at the inmates’ suffering and the heroism of Rose Blanche, without leaving out the confusion in the lives of both villagers and soldiers. Finally, is there not such a thing as liberation through cosmic awareness? A Chinese creation story that children love is that of the giant Pangu, who creates the world, element by element, by transforming parts of his own body. Or there is the story, also Chinese, of the cowherd who was human and the girl weaver who was a granddaughter of God the Supreme. As often happens when supernatural beings consort with humans, their union was not blessed by the gods. But the cowherd’s love was so strong that he was able to ascend to heaven, where he could at least contemplate his beloved, and they send signals to each other across the Milky Way. Andersen’s Little Mermaid also has a cosmic aspect in that the heroin’s love, first vanquished, finally undergoes metamorphosis and breaks out of the underwater world into outer space and communion with all creation. Or, take the Igbo story about the origin of day and night. A woman who was unable to conceive finally persuades the medicine man to enable her to have a child by magic means. He warns her that the child will be cursed. Indeed, the boy born to her develops into a bully who destroys everything around himself and finally threatens his mother. When she waves her protective charm, there is darkness. When the boy waves his charm, there is blazing light. In the end they both die, having initiated the alternating of day and night. Such fictional explanations of natural phenomena, in all cultures, are innumerable. Our Igbo story illustrates that they are not necessarily – nor are they meant to be – reassuring; they do, however, familiarize the imagination with the threateningly unfamiliar, and thus may help to alleviate fear. In proposing a typology of fiction that benefits the child’s emotional and intellectual development we cannot exclude the obverse side of

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the picture: literature that is not, or runs the risk of not being liberating, and might even, some would say, be harmful. There are texts that I would call crypto-adult because they primarily give aesthetic pleasure to adults or because they portray or problematize situations characteristic of the adult world. In my view, a number of English nursery rhymes belong to this category. What is there for the child’s imagination in the following poem: “Who killed Cock Robin? / I, said the sparrow / With my bow and arrow, / I killed Cock Robin. / Who saw him die? / I, said the Fly, / With my little eye, / I saw him die. / Who caught his blood? / I, said the Fish, / With my little dish, / I caught his blood” (Opie and Opie, 76). The necrophilic game goes on for thirteen verses until finally, in the fourteenth, the birds of the air express grief at the death of one of their own kind. It could be argued that such a poem helps the child to deal playfully with its aggressive tendencies, or that the sound patterns are satisfying, regardless of the images evoked. Thus, in a certain sense, there is expansion of imaginary experience; but is it liberating? Similarly, let us consider the nursery rhyme entitled “Woman’s Work.” Possibly, its very exaggeration of the abyss that separates men and women in traditional society as far as working hours are concerned serves as a dramatic, and ironic, antidote; but would not the small child receive it and chant it as a statement of what really is the case in the home? “The old woman must stand at the tub, tub, tub, / The dirty clothes to rub, rub, rub”; and even though, when the task is done, she dances on the green dressed like a lady, we have a double set of double standards here, from the point of view of both gender and social class, and the final lines really rub in the difference: “Man’s work lasts till set of sun, / Woman’s work is never done” (Opie and Opie, 90–1). Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies poses the problem of violence in its first chapters. It is his ill-treatment at the hands of Mr Grimes as well as the dangerous work he does that launches Tom, the little chimneysweep, into a whirl of sometimes supernatural, sometimes real adventures; gradually, the supernatural world of water babies corrects many evils, so that the child reader can dream with Tom of a world of cleanliness, kindness, beauty, while the real world, with its visible flaws, at least extends no false promises. With respect to the portrayal of violence, those who would rather see it frankly treated feel that once hostility is expressed, it is gone. This is why Robert Munsch – for example, in The Thursday Boat – connives with the child to identify with the giant in provoking God. He considers a degree of violence normal, and helps the child to channel it through very expressive, interactive story-telling.

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There is another kind of fiction that tries in vain to be liberating, fiction written with the intention of helping the child to work through a personal problem: death, illness, or divorce, or war, or racial prejudice. I call it semi-fiction if, despite the author’s endeavour, it appears artificial, didactic. Mamma’s Going To Buy You A Mocking-Bird by Jean Little takes that risk. Jeremy and Sarah’s father has been diagnosed with cancer. The whole family is spending the last weeks of his life at the summer cottage, and there are many moving accounts of symbolical moments that will become memories, many signals to the child reader to the effect that death is part of nature, that he or she is not alone among the human family, and that the love of the departed lives again in memory. What could have been the transcript of a programmed lesson in living gains warmth and poeticity, perhaps because of its quiet empathy with the two bereaved children. If, as Northrop Frye has shown, literature constructs an analogical world that best fulfils its function by remaining analogical, children’s fiction has a privileged place in it. Psychologically, the child relates with joy to “images of heroes who have to go out into the world all by themselves” and “find secure places in the world by following their right way with inner confidence”. Yet such fiction “could not have its psychological impact on the child were it not first and foremost a work of art” (Bettelheim, 11–12).

works cited Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred Knopf 1976. Danset-Léger, Jacqueline. L’Enfant et les images de la littérature enfantine. Bruxelles: Pierre Mardaga 1980. Escarpit, Denise, et Bernadette Poulou. Le Récit d’enfance: Enfance et écriture. Paris: Éditions du Sorbier 1993. Innocenti, Roberto. Rose Blanche. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education Inc. 1985. Jean, Georges. Pour une pédagogie de l’imaginaire. Paris: Casterman 1976. Kingsley, Charles. The Water Babies. 1863. New York: Oxford University Press 1995. Kroll, Virginia. Masai and I. Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan 1992. Lee, Dennis. Alligator Pie. Toronto: Macmillan 1974. Little, Jean. Mama’s Going To Buy You a Mocking-bird. Markham: Viking Kestrel 1984. Munsch, Robert. Giant, or, Waiting for the Thursday Boat. Toronto: Annick Press 1989. Opie, Iona and Peter, eds. The Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1963.

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Pearson, Landon. Children of Glasnost: Growing Up Soviet. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys 1990. Perrot, Jean. Du jeu, des enfants et des livres. Paris: Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie 1987. – Jeux graphiques dans l’album pour la jeunesse. Le Perreux: c.r.d.p. de l’Académie de Créteil 1991. Singer, Isaac Bashevis. Nobel Lecture. Stockholm: Nobel Foundation 1978.

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25 Myth and Literature: The Example of Modern Drama

Responding to a request for a course-outline proposal, this essay will be a set of prolegomena pointing out the pedagogic and theoretical potential of reflecting on myth in its multiple relationships to literature in any culture. The course would begin with an attempt to delineate literariness in relation to the already familiar materials (from the past near or far of the writer’s own culture, from the oral tradition, from the past and present of other civilizations, and so on) proposed by the collective imagination to the writer’s creativity. We would also explore the common ground of myth and literature as formal languages and symbolizations of man. The course would then go on to show the transformation process of the pre-existent narrative as it becomes reactualized in a given genre at a given time. The actual course on which these remarks are based dealt with four myths in twentieth-century European drama: Orpheus, Prometheus, Electra, and Antigone (occasionally, for a more developmental view, texts prior to the twentieth century were also used). There was an attempt to renovate the comparative approach by reversing Gilbert Highet’s method in chapter 23 of The Classical Tradition, a work showing the continuity of Greek and Roman thought and forms

Invited paper read at the Conference on the Implementation of a Curriculum on World Literature, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellaggio, Aug. 1982, on the basis of courses taught at Carleton University, Ottawa. Published in Neo-Helicon 10, no. 1 (1982): 41–55.

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in subsequent European literature and necessarily therefore emphasizing adherence to the classical heritage wherever it occurs. We took every opportunity to show that “aesthetization” works through transformation; that while the structure of myth works with the writer’s imagination to reproduce itself it does so through renewals; and that these renewals are due to defamiliarization (surprise features, even shocking features to the spectator who knows the myth) within the familiar network, by substitution within a set of elements and functions that remain stable. In designing new courses it is important to situate them squarely in world literature, avoiding eurocentricity (this does not necessarily mean to cease analysing what we know best but, among other things, to put it into perspective). In this case the two questions to be asked are: 1. Do the theory and the method used have validity beyond the examples to which they were applied? 2. Does that validity extend outside the cultural context in which it was used? It could be said that our method has good chances of being valid for many myths (Greek, biblical, Oriental) inasmuch as they enter into the making of modern European and American plays, since, as will be shown, transformability of the myth within a stable overall structure is a concept of unlimited application once its functioning is discovered and the explanation accepted. But beyond? 1. Beyond drama, in order to venture into other genres, it would be necessary to find out whether myth in relation to them has the same “prehensile” power as in the case of drama. In The Mythological Novel J. White has shown that the modern novelist’s imagination will create mythical equivalents (and with greater aesthetic success and communicative power for the modern reader) rather than adhere to predetermined mythological paths. It is in poetry that the narrative structure of myths would appear least likely to be assimilated. If all modern literature shuns referentiality, at least of a simplistic kind, this is doubly true of poetry, where every word must earn a new life, transplanted into the poem. Through connotation, however, chosen aspects of the world we know come into the poem; and when myth enters, even in the form of an allusion, it has the power to evoke in the reader’s mind the entire mythical level that served the poet to encode his message. Occasionally, of course, as is the case in Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus, a more complete identification between the poetic vision and the myth will be achieved; but even then it will not be the sequential identification of the narrative genres but the converging of a world order and an aesthetic order in the mythical figure of Orpheus. When Ronsard says simply at the end of a sonnet to Helene “Je serai ton Orphée, et toi mon Eurydice,” the reader is left to recreate the entire opposition

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between the agitation of courtly life and the sacrificial road that alone leads to the unity of love and song. This leads us in turn to ask what is centrally wanted from a myth and literature study. Trousson makes it very clear (theoretically in Un problème de littérature comparée: les études de thèmes, essai de méthodologie and in practice in his own major work on Prometheus) that the conscientious comparatist can do no less than to follow his theme (mythical figure, according to his own definition) historically, from the first occurrence to the last, through the history of literature. This seems appropriate if what we seek is an inventory of the kind that Highet or Bolgar initiated: the entire range of the transformations of a myth, as one facet among others of literary history. But we have to ask how much such knowledge adds to a more systematic, renewed literary history (literary history that is not atomistic). Trousson’s Prometheus, and my own Orpheus (1961), are convenient touchstones for confirming that a writer fits in more or less with the aesthetics of his period/ movement. In that sense these are informative studies; but they seem to relate dramatists (Anouilh), would-be opera writers (Segalen), novelists (Drouot), and poets (Jouve, Emmanuel) to one another within one national literature (and does it make more sense or less if the study embraces more than one literature?) on the sole basis that they have dwelt on the same myth. Again, the results are not unmeaningful: myths are touchstones; in the case of Orpheus one can certainly recreate within each generation a minority trend among artistic dreams identified with Orpheus. However, a course on Greek myths in modern drama should not centre upon the survival of the mythical content, and especially the hero, alone: whether it uses one myth or more (a practical choice, partly conditioned by the duration of the course), it uses the mythical content and its historical becoming as a means to deepen the student’s knowledge of Drama. The myth is studied inasmuch as it enters into relationships with theatricality. Therefore, it could also be studied as a dynamic component of the fictionality of narrative and of the poeticity of poetry. In each case the transformations of myth will follow the dynamic of the genre itself. 2. Beyond the initial cultural context? Earlier we asked whether a myth course using a similar approach could be fruitfully recreated in differing cultural contexts. Our initial course was given in a North American context, which (Quebec students sometimes protest this) extends the European context. Its methodology attempted to use some of the insights of structuralism but to go beyond it; specifically it took into account Piaget’s definition of structure as self-regulating to explain the so far somewhat inexplicable resilience of myths, their “pou-

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voir de survie.” If they are structures according to Piaget’s definition and act as such, they survive by transformation within constitutive elements. However, this plus the “grammar” of myth according to Lévi-Strauss and Greimas gives us only a set of general principles to understand how products of the collective imagination such as myths sometimes reappear, very far in time and space from their original religious context, as materials for the modern drama (novel, poetry). The question of how this reappearance generates literature cannot be answered on structuralist grounds alone (structural analysis is by definition reduction) but, on the contrary, on the grounds of individuation, such as is implied in aesthetics of reception and in hermeneutics. Later we shall consider examples. The question here is whether the analytic, structural steps would be applicable in the case of mythical content and its integration in any literary work, Eastern or Western. I have no doubt about the point of view of cultural anthropology, since typically the method of Lévi-Strauss, which has supplied some of the basis for literary structuralism, is designed to be universally valid. In western Canada, for example, Lévi-Strauss gathered examples of multiple Indian mythologies for years. The well-known analysis of the Oedipus myth in Anthropologie structurale supplies an abstract model that can be translated in the direction of a variety of analyses, just as the Propp model in Morphologie du conte russe can be adapted to any quest once you have understood that you do not have to look for the same thirty-three elements in every tale but have instead to create a model incorporating a certain number of functions, and above all to avoid literal application of Propp’s categories. The purpose of Lévi-Strauss’s method was to apply the same analytical tools to many contemporary cultures so as to avoid the costly – and arduous – research task of retracing the past of all cultures in complete detail. I am convinced of the adaptability of his practice and of its usefulness. But there has been a question on my mind ever since the 1975 international conference in Taiwan, which examined Eastern and Western critical attitudes in relation to one another. It is this: would a modern Chinese or Japanese scholar admit this usefulness and this adaptability, or would he consider the step of structural analysis – which, I repeat, is only one step, which does not absolve the scholar from further probings of the resulting work of art – a sort of mechanical product of the Western mind? This is part of a larger question: are we now, in comparative literature studies or whatever kindred discipline, capable of creating and using a metalanguage that will account for our separate yet corresponding critical actions? The pedagogical aspect of this question, relating to the creation of a curriculum valid, with substitutions, across the board, is the following:

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am I to find, in Chinese or Japanese or Indian literature, and more specifically yet, twentieth-century drama, examples that resemble one another; or am I to find out what equivalents there are in other cultures a) of the role played by drama in Europe between the two wars; b) of the touchstone part played by myths drawn from the Greek tradition in European thought and art? At the seventh congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, Professor Echeruo of Nigeria showed with success that previous attempts to equate Igbo folk festivals with drama in the European sense were inexact because the comparison between the two was based on a metaphorical use of the concept of drama. It is conceivable that typologically the Igbo festival has something in common with the collectiveness of medieval passion plays, but not, as has been thought previously, with the aesthetic or ideational patterns of Greek drama. And we could find many other negative examples of such extrapolation. Now, having formulated ever so many warnings about what is in effect the undue use of mere resemblances in comparative literature, or world literature studies, let us turn to the positive side and state first of all why myths in literature offer such potential for part of a curriculum that would attempt to be valid, with the necessary local substitutions, in many countries. First of all, there is the quasi-universal occurrence of myth as narrative theogonic and cosmogonic explanation at the dawn of many if not all civilizations; and second, there is the tendency of these stories to remain, though in changing, fragmentary forms, in the collective imagination, sometimes long after they have ceased to be matters of belief, and their potential for assuming literary forms. The anthropologist, of course, considers that at this point myths for him have become degraded phenomena and therefore lost their attraction. For the literary scholar, on the contrary, the transfer from one formal language to another, one communicative situation to another, has much interest. For the stuff of literature, as that of myth, pertains to the power of imagination both in its permanent, collective dimension and in its individual, transforming activity. In a wide sense poets are interpreters of myths, especially if we add to the definition of myth some of its modern uses, which show that man’s myth-making capacity has never ceased but continues – in the political realm, for instance – to project new but equally compelling representations of itself as in the distant past. Northrop Frye takes both myth and literature in their widest sense when he shows the ordered way in which they combine, in infinite yet systematic variety, to represent mankind to itself. What probably stands foremost within each narrative to be transformed into literature is the figure of the mythical hero. Käte Ham-

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burger has said of the enduring significance of the Greek mythical figures: “Die Wandlungen der antiken Dramenfiguren zeigen darum auch mit besonderer Deutlichkeit den jeweiligen Stand des Selbstverständnisses des menschlichen Geistes an. Es ist anzunehmen, daβ neue Wandlungen des Menschenbildes auch wieder neue Umformungen dieser Griechischen Musterfiguren hervorbringen werden, die am Anfang der abendländischen Geistesgeschichte stehen” (213). The reference here is of course to mythical figures already transformed into literary works of art in the Greek drama; and our original course was made particularly interesting from a comparative point of view by the fact that these previous versions existed as theatre art and not merely as mythical material, so that the modern playwright had to pit his imagination against the double moulding action of the myth itself and of its Greek theatrical expression, especially in the case of Electra, which all three great Greek dramatists had treated, Aeschylus in the Choephori and Sophocles and Euripides in their respective Elektra plays. The literary scholar may or may not, as a person, accept the world of myths, archetypes, and symbols as manifesting the unity of the human mind, either diachronically or synchronically. Anthropologists themselves are not agreed on this point. With or without making a philosophical decision, the literary scholar may at least ponder the unifying possibility, and perhaps reality, of myth. Rather than the entire Orpheus myth, let us take the more restricted example of the descent into hell motif, present in all versions. Wherever it occurs, the visit to the kingdom of the dead is reserved for the demi-god or a most privileged hero. There are examples in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and in the Osiris myth; but among the Sumerians Inanna visits the dead; so does Enkidu at the end of the twelfth tablet of Gilgamesh. Among the Babylonians it is Ishtar, goddess of love (whereas Inanna is the fertility goddess). At any rate, the myth of Ishtar bears resemblances at times with that of Cybele and at others with that of Persephone; and the fact that she can leave the “Land of no return” only under certain conditions is also reminiscent of the story of Eurydice, with the consequent interdiction, although there is no transgression. Such examples could be multiplied, more easily, of course, with motifs attached to myths than with entire myths. It remains, however, that as Harry Levin has reasserted in Refractions, crosscultural study of myths is possible and fruitful. Furthermore, as H. Weinreich has shown, any myth exhibits by nature a certain number of narrative characteristics that exist in any culture and any language and are present, and valid, for literary analysis as well: those he calls “situationnels,” “métalinguistiques,” “persistants,” and “permanents.” The same author warns us against the structuralist tendency towards endless

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paradigmatic relating of mythical material, whereas what is so important for literary knowledge is what becomes of the mythical material in a given transformation, in its syntagmatic dimension, in what makes this story different from any other story. Additional reasons for studies based in myth can also be considered: 1. The re-mythicizing of literature in modern times, at least in the sense that as the sacred is evacuated from the realm of commonly shared belief (and not just in Western culture), literature assumes some of the functions of myth (this has, for example, been said of the modern novel and also of film). Is it not true, however, that the stage has more concrete appeal in bringing the reader-spectator into personal contact with fictionality? Events in literary works, as in myths, become visible, emblematic (Jolles); in drama, the inner eye of imagination is aided in multiple, concrete ways. But whatever genre we focus upon, myth, which Jolles has designated as proto-philosophy in the distant past of civilizations, because of the manner in which the collective mind orders narratives into answers to the metaphysical questions it asks itself, could also be called “proto-literature.” 2. That is in fact another reason why myth is so compelling to certain writers and why it also constitutes a privileged terrain for the student of literature. Just as the mythical imagination has ordered the universe into narrative at the mythopoeic stage, the creative writer reorders the stuff of myth, and that of reality, into a distinct, coherent whole. If he is thinking of Orpheus, for example, he has not only the literary sources but a thousand often mysterious years of Greek religion to nourish his imagination (see Guthrie). 3. To study the re-creating of myth in literature, especially in drama, is thus to be able to watch the creative imagination at work in an informed way, since we know the “standard” myth. Thus we are better able to understand the structure of the dramatist’s universe in other works as we unveil the conscious or perhaps unconscious intertextual role of the myth among these works. 4. Gilbert Durand has shown how in myth the imagination especially sets up for itself images of death, and temporality leading to death, and then creates stories of triumph over these authors of its anguish. Though all literary genres partake of this ability, drama becomes re-enactment of myth, which in itself is already re-enactment. Aesthetically, such plays provide a striking median between the familiar and the unfamiliar. The addressee of the message is the spectator, but it was in the first place the author formulating an answer to himself and projecting it into the dramatis personae.

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In different countries or zones at different times there occur waves of mythological theatre, rather than a continuous strain. Mostly I have drawn on European drama of the entre-deux-guerres. The explanation that consists in saying that mythology was a veil to take the German occupiers’ attention away from the real message is true only for a limited number of these plays. I would favour the kind of explanation that would see this trend as the symptom of a crisis of consciousness, including the modern psychologizing of the previously sacred. I have not probed further to see how myth survives, for example, the absurd. It seems to me that it has the same fate in this regard as language itself – that is, that it survives “en pointillé,” virtually, in the form of desire and nostalgia.

p l ay s s t u d i e d i n t h e o r i g i n a l c o u r s e Here is a selected list of texts that have been used; it is incomplete and should be enriched and adapted according to the students’ languages, the availability of translations, and further materials from other literatures as desired. Orpheus Sources: Orphica; Pindar, IVth Pythica; Ap. of Rhodes, Argonautika; Vergil, Georgics IV; Ovid, Metamorphoses X, XI; Victor Segalen, Orphéeroi; Kokoschka, Orpheus and Eurydike; Anouilh, Eurydice; Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending (see also its earlier version, Battle of Angels). Further in the past one could think of A. Poliziano’s Favola di Orfeo; Calderón’s Auto sacramental del divino Orfeo; Corneille’s Conquête de la Toison d’or, and several operas. Prometheus Sources: Aeschylus, Prometheus bound; Calderón, Prometeo y Epimeteo; Goethe, Prometheus-fragment; Shelley, Prometheus unbound; Gide, Prométhée mal enchaîné. Antigone Sources: Sophocles, Antigone; Hasenclever, Antigone; Anouilh, Antigone; Cocteau, Antigone. Electra Aeschylus, Choephori; Sophocles, Elektra; Euripides, Elektra; Hofmannsthal, Elektra; O’Neill, Mourning becomes Electra; Giraudoux, Electre; Sartre, Les Mouches.

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In each text the students were encouraged to seek out “paths of transformation,” to view the text syntagmatically and to recognize in each myth its necessary segments. The features researched were: 1. The narrative sequence and its components. Are any of the constitutive elements of the standard myth missing? If so, what replaces them in their function? Dramatists pick and choose, and they transform episodes, but there is a general tendency for a myth to remain “whole.” Kokoschka’s play is essentially about love and hate: Hades in it is a person who separates Orpheus from Eurydike. Death plays its “normal” part, but the third important motif – the singing of Orpheus – is present in symbolical form, just enough to remind the spectator of Orpheus’s exceptional status within mankind. 2. The actorial structure. This can lead to important probings of the survival of myths in modern drama. In Cocteau’s Orphée there appears a horse spelling out with its hoof: “Madame Eurydice reviendra des Enfers,” which fits in well enough with the standard myth until one realizes that the initials of this statement spell the word “merde.” There definitely is no horse in either Vergil’s or Ovid’s poem! In Cocteau’s case (he is then in the midst of his Catholic meanderings, not to mention dadaism – and a horse is in French children’s language a “dada”) these two tendencies combined make him reflect upon poetic inspiration: the horse is his inner Pegasus but has to be externalized, as everything else is in the “poésie de théâtre”; thus the horse takes the place of what in other versions, stemming from classical antiquity and the Renaissance, would be the lyre of Orpheus. In Giraudoux’s Electre the beggar replaces the ancient chorus. In Hasenclever’s expressionist Antigone the crowd represents the chorus but, appropriately, in a more aggressive manner. 3. The use of stage space. In Orpheus Descending Hades is upstairs. 4. Symbols. Agamemnon’s robe, which in the Choephori is used by Orestes and Electra to trap and kill Clytemnestra, becomes the family gun in O’Neill’s trilogy. As to the blood-guilt so often represented by furies, harpies, and flies, O’Neill transforms it into family resemblance: in re-enacting the myth more and more intensely, the members of the Mannon family increasingly resemble the masklike portraits of their ancestors. And of course, in Promethée mal enchaîné it becomes a great fashion to have your own personalized eagle permanently devouring your liver. 5. Ideology. It is easy to see how Anouilh’s Antigone, for instance, represents the contemporary kind of political resistance; every period, every country can supply its own, or read its own into a text from the past. In O’Neill, but even as early as Hofmannsthal, family relationships take on a Freudian colouring.

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The most striking example, perhaps, of a narrative segment (mytheme) carrying a renewed meaning (mythologem) occurs in Sartre’s Les Mouches. In former traditions Orestes is the very incarnation of unfreedom. It is he who says: “Je me livre en aveugle au destin qui m’entraîne” in Racine’s Andromaque; whether it is due to the Ancient’s fatum, or to Racine’s inner, psychologically driven destiny, he cannot hope to aspire to freedom, even if he regains his home and country. By contrast, Sartre makes him the liberator not only of himself but of others as well. Theatrically, this is an excellent feature because the spectators will notice the reversal in the meaning of the Orestes figure precisely because of the sharpness of the contrast. The course can concentrate on one category of transformations or relate them to one another to arrive at a general theory of aesthetic renewal and consequent reception, and, perhaps, of myth itself.

works cited Guthrie, William K.C. Orpheus and Greek Religion: A Study of the Orphic Movement. New York: Norton 1966. Hamburger, Käte. Von Sophokles zu Sartre: Griechische Dramenfiguren antik und modern. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer 1962. Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature. New York: Oxford University Press 1964. Jolles, André. Formes simples. Paris: Éditions de Seuil 1972. Kushner, Eva. Le Mythe d’Orphée dans la littérature française contemporaine. Paris: Nizet 1961. – “Greek Myths in Modern Drama: Paths of Transformation.” In Literary Criticism and Myth, ed. Joseph P. Strelka. Pennsylvania State University Press 1980. 198–209. Levin, Harry. Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature. New York: Oxford University Press 1966. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon 1973. Propp, Vladimir Iakovlevich. Morphologie du conte. Trans. Claude Ligny. Paris: Gallimard 1970. Trousson, Raymond. Le Thème de Prométhée dans la littérature européenne. Genève: Librairie Droz 1964. – Un problème de littérature comparée: les études de thèmes, essai de méthodologie. Paris: Minard 1965. Weinreich, Harald. Poétique 1 (1970): 25–34. White, John J. Mythology in the Modern Novel: A Study of Prefigurative Techniques. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971.

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26 Greek Myths in Modern Drama: Paths of Transformation

To study the reappearances of myth in literature is to encounter the paradox of permanence and transformation. The haunting question that arises for the critic and the historian as well as for the theoretician of literature and those who study the anthropological, psychological, and sociological aspects of imagination is that of the resilience of myths. How is it that these ancient narratives – very often Greek myths in the case of the literatures of the West – survive and revive with everrenewed meaning for writers, readers, and spectators of subsequent periods? What is the source of their power of resurgence? It is not my ambition to give a direct answer to this question but rather to suggest a method of analysis that, by attempting to shed a ray of light upon the manner in which classical myths renew themselves as they are transmitted from one literary version to another, may indirectly offer some pointers toward the sources of their viability. Until the rise and development of structuralist studies, two main methods were applied to the study of myths in literature, both of which could be subsumed under the heading of thematology. Thematology in general has the immense merit of fostering complete inventories of the stories of mythical heroes and of the narratives that enshrine all their actions, and of requiring “reasoned” analyses with homogeneous criteria. Fourteen years after the publication of his book Un problème de

Chapter of Literary Criticism and Myth, Yearbook of Comparative Criticism, no. 9, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (Pennsylvania State University Press 1980), 198–209.

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littérature comparée: les études de thème, essai de méthodologie, Raymond Trousson still maintains his exigency of completeness in the historical survey of any given myth, for fear that fragmentary studies distort the results through ignorance of past contexts and of the modes of reception of myths in artificially isolated fragments of time. If indeed the leading question is the question he asks at the end of his essay – “Pourquoi les mêmes mythes reviennent-ils de génération en génération?” (92) – Trousson is right to consider the long-range history of each myth throughout the history of literature as a necessary field of investigation; and although in my view completeness of coverage is not a sufficient guarantee of success, it will at least preclude error in relating versions and interpretations of versions to one another. Of these two forms of thematology, the first is thematology “avant la lettre”: it prides itself upon following in an exhaustive manner all examples of a given myth in a given time of the history of literature or in a geographical area. It is based on rather literal use of Stoffgeschichte. It therefore presupposes an original occurrence or set of occurrences of the myth in classical antiquity, and it probes modern literatures for examples of its recurrence. But explicitly or implicitly, it always expects the modern creator to adhere to the past model. Thus, in chapter 23 of Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition, modern theatrical versions of ancient mythical stories are described with their various degrees of deviance from their prototypes. Characterization, variations in basic plots, and the use of colloquial language are all regarded as “anachronisms.” Dream interpretation and Freudian slips in Cocteau’s La Machine infernale; the brutal language of the soldiers in Hasenclever’s Antigone; the painfully real Electra complex, marked by attachment to the dead father, in Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, are but examples of transgressions against that which such a conception of thematology regards as its true aesthetic norm: fidelity to the ancient model. In my view this manner of approaching modern literary texts should be reversed, and the element of change should be viewed as a sine qua non of aesthetic success. This does not mean that change alone is a guarantee of success but that it is a symptom of survival to be taken into account with other factors of aesthetic success, such as coherence patterns in renewal and coherence between ancient signifier and new signified. Furthermore, Highet had a static view of myths as signifiers: “For century after century men have been captivated by the Greek legends, have told them in different ways, elaborating some and neglecting others, have sought different beauties and values in them, and when they gave them conscious interpretations, have deduced from them many different kinds of truth” (520). It is as if myths were static containers into which various societies, at different times, infuse various meanings. The

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interpretation changes, but the basic myth remains the same, thanks to some “force” inherent in it. Because of this invariability it can be filled, so to say, with many meanings, as if it were itself a neutral form. The uniqueness of each new version, which is an exact symbiosis between the narrative structure, a moment, and a literary work, is lost from sight, and so is the fact that the myth, while remaining itself, undergoes substantive changes. The second traditional approach consists in considering the various successive versions of a myth as variations upon a theme, after the fashion of musical variations. Here the myth is also taken as a static rather than a dynamic entity insofar as it is a passive object in the hands of the author, who manipulates its forms and meanings according to his own idiosyncrasies. The myth simply serves the literary critic as a touchstone for detecting these idiosyncrasies; the author’s intellectual horizon is measured purely in its relation to the myth rather than in its relation to historical and social context. All versions thus appear to exist in a perennial contemporaneity, and the comparing of versions as an intellectual exercise hardly enriches our knowledge of the myth itself. The critic’s mind thus juggles with styles, movements, trends, even periods. His mind contemplates – and exaggerates – the permanence of the mythical narrative and enjoys its transformations without analysing their causes or their nature. Let us take as an example the myth of Orpheus (see Kushner, 1961). Is he not, from the depths of Hellenic times to our day, the founder of poetry and music, the civilizing hero pitched against all cruelty and barbarity? More or less directly, Vergil’s hymn of harmony is heard in the Auto sacramental del divino Orfeo, where it merges with a Christian vision; in Cocteau’s witty Orphée of 1927 as well as in the film of the same name; in the cruel and dreamlike atmosphere of Kokoschka’s Orpheus und Eurydike; and in the sordid meeting places of Anouilh’s Eurydice. In each case the historical moment acts as a prism producing a set of variations; the narrative structure seems unaffected. This can lead us to consider the unity it confers upon various versions as the sign of a permanent entity within the imagination. Trousson has reminded us that it is all too easy to extrapolate from this to ontological considerations regarding the permanence of human nature. He admits that myths are enduring entities and refers to their essence and pérennité; but he regards as superficial the kind of extrapolation that would bridge centuries in order to associate into kindred families authors in whose thought a given myth occupies a central place. Le thème est un fil conducteur, éternel à travers la durée, qui se charge, au long des siècles, de tout le butin artistique et philosophique amassé, sur sa

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route illimitée, par l’aventurier humain; c’est pourquoi il préserve et restitue, à travers ses innombrables transmutations, quelques constantes, quelques préoccupations fondamentales, en un mot quelque chose de l’essentiel de la nature humaine. (91)

Thus we know that myth points toward enduring structures, but it neither identifies nor explains them. This indeterminacy is in itself a sign and a promise of vitality and prepares an answer for Trousson’s following question, which is: “Pourquoi les mêmes mythes reviennent-ils de génération en génération?” We might venture to say that it is on account of the prehensile nature of myths as structures in Lévi-Strauss’s sense of the word, that is, as sets of interrelationships in which, furthermore, the signifier absorbs the new signified every time and thus gives rise to a new signifier from which new signification emerges so that a dialectic of the unfamiliar and the familiar is enacted. It has often been said that defamiliarization is the very crux of literariness. Thus in order to renew itself for new audiences the myth must adopt a new code and new code-breakers. But the thoroughly unfamiliar would not, contrary to this theory, produce the desired effect on the spectator’s mind: ostranienie arises from the very familiarity of the mythical story made appealingly different by an element of divergence, but again familiar by a signification consequent with the more ancient meanings of the myth. Thus the permanence of myths as they manifest themselves in modern literature lies not in fixity of narrative detail, nor in an ontological unity of the human mind as enshrined in the world of myths, nor again in the preservation of a classical flavour, but in the very dynamics of myth itself. The structuralist concept of myth sheds considerable light upon the so-called power that myths seem to possess towards reshaping themselves across time, space, and cultural contexts. Piaget’s definition of structures as having the qualities of “totalité, auto-réglage et transformation” (78) is basic: if myths indeed are structures, they are not dependent upon one culture, one epoch, one specific narrative version, but have the ability to recombine elements of form and meaning through the very process of transformation, whereas it used to be thought that they survived in some esoteric way, immutably, despite transformation. But the structuralist explanation cannot thoroughly satisfy the literary critic and historian: it accounts for the survival of myth in imagination, individual and collective, as a referential reality, but not for a given author’s grasp of it. We are still faced with another fact, which is the “reaestheticizing” of myth in a literary, and more particularly dramatic work of art. As myth moves away from its religious or ethical role and is drawn into literary texts and contexts, the strict anthropologist

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may think that it loses its identity qua myth. None the less, and perhaps for that very reason, myth is reactivated by the imagination as it becomes transformed into a literary work. This change should not be viewed as some sort of decay, lest we fall, by adherence to anthropological patterns, into the same attitude as that already described of the traditional literary historian. It should in my view be studied in the light of the unity of the imagination, in the manner most comprehensively described by Northrop Frye. Frye’s system accounts for the common features and functions of literature and myth and thus explains the perennial presence (and present) of myth. Archetypal criticism begins by drawing individual myths out of their mysterious and mystifying isolation and makes of them the very pivots of a coherent conception, not only of the literary work itself and of its literariness but also of the entire community of literary works – that is, of literature. A deep and seminal link exists precisely between myth and literature: is not literature the modern form of myth, and does not the modern playwright who chooses a mythical narrative, at the crossroads of literary tradition and the collective imagination, make, so to say, a double investment in his creation? I do not conclude from this that a mythological play is necessarily a double success from the aesthetic viewpoint, in that it keeps the narrative structure of myth and reactualizes it in a historical and literary conjuncture. I only say that it has an exemplary value towards explaining the kinship of myth and literature, since both forms of discourse are illuminated by being viewed in their mutual relationship. In both cases – and all the more when myth is given new literary life by a modern author – narration embodies and manifests its own meaning. Or it can be said more simply that it affirms itself in its temporal rhythm and its recurrences; it carries reference to itself rather than to the surrounding reality, which does not mean that it is devoid of the real but rather the contrary: mythical narrative is prehensile to the extent that it transforms the historical moment into a new signifier, of which the signified is drawn from classical antiquity. Returning to Frye, we can say that according to him myths form a language that has as its archetypal and central example the myth of the quest, with its cyclical character manifesting the rhythm of the sun (day-night opposition) as well as the rhythm of life (life-death opposition) and that of dream (sleep-consciousness opposition). Thus every local myth, specific though it may be and to whatever culture it may belong, communicates with the major mythical formations, not through its ritual origins but through its actualized form. Obviously, in this respect Frye draws upon such thinkers as Frazer and Jung to show the interdependence of the great symbolical formations.

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It also appears that the autoregenerative capacity of the myth is linked to its narrative functioning, which in turn relates to its structural nature. Myths behave as structures, and this holds true of their literary manifestations; according to Piaget they act as wholes, regulate themselves and transform themselves. If we consider a mythological play in this perspective, it is obvious that we do not expect it (as did Highet) to be the replica of an ancient, unsurpassable model but to bring back to life, through an interplay of equivalences, that is, by transformation, the sum total of the mythemes that make up the “standard” myth. Every time such a transformation occurs, it should be received as wholly belonging to the myth by dint of the interplay of equivalences. “All accretions to the myth belong,” says Harry Levin (112), and Lévi-Strauss makes a similar statement: “Toutes les versions appartiennent au mythe.” Our task is to discuss the manner in which radically new elements come to “belong.” One obvious locus of transformation is the “actorial” organization of a play. The concept of “actor” by far exceeds that of character, since it can subsume several characters whose effects are cumulative and complete one another, while also combining with non-human agents, which can be real, symbolical, or imaginary. At the beginning of Cocteau’s Orphée, for example, the hero has a double – the horse – which, according to him, symbolizes his poetic inspiration and perhaps represents his subconscious. Later in the play the poet acquires a more exalted double: Hurtubise, the window repairman, who in fact becomes his guardian angel. Here are two projections of the poet’s soul, opposed yet complementary. They are figures quite specific to Cocteau’s play. The first could be said to express in eminently theatrical fashion, if only by using surprise, a perception of poetry touched by Freudianism and Surrealism. The second reflects Cocteau’s brief encounter with Maritain and Catholicism. The two adjuvants (helpers) through whom the character of Orpheus is both differentiated and corroborated are not only distinct from each other but opposite in nature; yet their main function in the actorial organization is together to oppose Aglaonice, the true enemy of poetry, an enemy all the more dangerous since she too claims to be a poet. But let us return to the two additional actors created by Cocteau: with Orpheus himself they establish at a specific moment in history (1927) the saving role of poetry among men. Such enrichments of the actorial organization may at first sight appear heretical, at least in the eyes of the strict historian. Are they not fanciful extrapolations on the part of the author, products of the imagination bearing much less relation to the myth than to the vagaries of contemporary taste? I hope to show that the very contrary is the case.

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The extrapolation is sometimes so extreme that one may wonder if it still belongs. There are two complementary manners of ascertaining whether it does. The first relates to the reception of the device by the reader or spectator. Reception is not our concern here, but it should be pointed out that the author necessarily seeks equivalent sources of religious emotion, philosophical thought, or aesthetic enjoyment to those conveyed by elements of earlier plays. Thus spectators of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending would be more sensitized to the cruelty of the conservative merchants in a Southern town towards an unconventional travelling musician than to any antiquarian representation of the Bacchantes. The other test consists in examining whether an invented or superimposed actor can be considered by dint of his function to be equivalent to an actor or actors in the standard myth. In Giraudoux’s Electre the gardener creates no problem in this respect; although his fanciful discourses make him the mouthpiece of Giraudoux in the play and although he is not yet Electre’s husband, he fulfils in the play the functions attributed by Euripides to the ploughman. But what about the beggar, a pure invention of Giraudoux, capable through his absurd intuitiveness of predicting the moment when a person “declares” himself, becomes himself, takes charge of his destiny? It would be too easy to say he corresponds to the chorus; at any rate, there are other secondary characters in the play who substitute for the chorus. However, the beggar shares an important function with the Corypheus in Aeschylus’ Choephori: the truly maieutic function he fulfils as he elicits from Electra and Orestes the secrets of what is to follow. In Mourning Becomes Electra this maieutic function belongs to Seth, the gardener, who plumbs the depths of all that is hidden in the hearts of the members of the Mannon tribe. Thus the function of Giraudoux’s beggar is taken over in O’Neill’s text by the gardener, who is, however, neither the betrothed nor the husband of Lavinia, the Electra in this play; Lavinia’s fiancé is Peter, a childhood friend. In the intertextuality of the various versions a system of transfers can be seen to operate and to preserve the essential functions. What guarantees theatrical success, however, is the individuation and embodying of a function in a novel, unexpected character. Certain actorial enrichments are due no longer to the transformation of one character into another but of an idea or a symbol into a character. In Cocteau’s Orphée death appears as an impressively efficient lady surgeon dressed in a laboratory coat and escorted by two assistants. In Anouilh’s Eurydice death is also physically embodied, this time by a stranger in a raincoat whom Orpheus met on his way and who introduces himself as Mr Henry. In both cases the presence of

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death is visually manifest so as to help the expression of a mythologem through a mytheme that is the very mytheme of the classical story reactualized. In Cocteau’s play, in which everything is poésie de théâtre and functions allegorically, Eurydice must die; the poet must be severed from an aspect of his own self before reunification of self is possible at a more sublimated level. Death counts, therefore, among the helpers (adjuvants), despite her very temporary collaboration with the wicked Aglaonice (the most perfidious embodiment of the shepherd Aristeus!); the resolution of the crisis involves a passage through death, but the end turns out in a manner quite opposite to that which Aglaonice had planned. In Anouilh’s play Mr Henry is linked with the mytheme in which Orpheus, by looking back, kills Eurydice a second time. Does this mean that death as represented by Mr Henry is among the opponent forces? In order to answer adequately one would have to retrace the history of the respectus in relation to death through various periods and cultural outlooks. In summary, though it is true that in Vergil’s and Ovid’s versions – whether the backward glance is motivated by a lapse into madness or by defiance of the gods of the underworld – the kingdom of death differs radically from that of life, Anouilh tenders an invitation to death by endowing it with a friendly countenance and inverting its traditional role. Anouilh is by no means the only modern artist in whose vision such a reversal takes place (Kokoschka in Orpheus und Eurydike provides another example); but the obsession with “purity” is specific to Anouilh and gives infinite value to death as opposed to life by casting a static and idealized image of Eurydice into the immutable mould, and the domain, of death. These examples suffice to show that the transformation is a relational process and that relations occur according to functions rather than symbolizations once and for all determined in the past. The concept of function is one of our key concepts since, necessarily, individual functional expressions correspond to the mythical function within the human imagination in general, while each individual expression belongs to the entire system without ceasing to be individual. Through a function we can see the unfolding of the process that Northrop Frye calls “displacement,” and which in some cases is coextensive with literary invention itself. Thus there exists in Mourning Becomes Electra a striking physical resemblance among all the members of the Mannon family, a kind of mask that becomes more forceful and compelling as each Mannon espouses his individual destiny. By dint of this literary strategy O’Neill adopts and emphasizes the motif of the accursed blood that weighs upon the household of Mannon as it did upon that of Atreus: the fatum of the ancients, and in modern, and more

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specifically Freudian terms, guilt. In the Mannon family the motif of resemblance is the external, eminently theatrical manifestation of the guilt that dwells in the very blood of the Atreides. Again the transformation we are discussing, and its accompanying aesthetic fulfillment, can have a symbol as its locus. Thus the sacrificial robe in which Clytemnestra traps Agamemnon in Aeschylus’s play and which is then used by Electra and Orestes to kill Aegisthus becomes, among the Mannons, the family tool for suicide and murder: the gun, which in function is identical to Agamemnon’s ritual robe. Even the use of scenic space can be locus and occasion of renewal: in Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending the underworld is above the ordinary world represented by the confectionery store; in Kokoschka’s Orpheus und Eurydike Hades is both a character and a place. Last but by no means least, the locus of transformation and aesthetic fulfilment can be the writer’s vision taking possession of the narrative structure. Here one could mention the psychologizing process that the myths of Electra and Antigone, among others, undergo in modern literature as they evolve further and further from their religious and ethical origins. Perhaps the most striking example of distanciation from the classical story, which nevertheless achieves unity with it, is the radical reversal Jean-Paul Sartre imposes on the story of Orestes in Les Mouches, since he illustrates his contempt of liberty by the very hero who was once, and long remained, the personification of non-liberty. Aeschylus in his trilogy emphasizes the dependence of man and even of the gods themselves upon the laws of justice. Even if it takes several generations, man must learn by suffering that crime will be punished and, more positively, that justice must be done. At the end of the trilogy it is implied that Orestes has atoned sufficiently for the crimes of the house of Atreus and that he might eventually be released. Athene declares him free of the blood-guilt. But the exercise of his freed will can only occur in Argos once again, within the laws of his city; Orestes vanishes so that his personal fate can be fulfilled in the collective peace that is now restored. Nothing could therefore be more different from the Eumenides of Aeschylus than Sartre’s Les Mouches, with its abhorrence of the acceptance of any guilt whatsoever. Oreste, despite his earlier resistance to the morality imposed by Aegisthus upon the people of Argos, seems ready in the second act to give in to the Eumenides, symbolized by the flies: “Je suis libre, Electre. La liberté a fondu sur moi comme la foudre” (163). Electre, on the other hand, feels her past weighing upon her and determining her future: “Peux-tu empêcher que nous soyons pour toujours les assassins de notre mère?” Oreste’s reply is of course a manifesto of existentialist freedom pronounced in circumstances that Sartre has taken over from

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the trilogy but to which he gives an opposite meaning. Oreste has “assumed” his act, taken it upon himself; he recognizes himself in it: “Crois-tu que je voudrais t’empêcher? J’ai fait mon acte, Electre, et cet acte était bon. Je le porterai sur mes épaules … et j’en rendrai compte. Et plus il sera lourd à porter, plus je me réjouirai, car ma liberté, c’est lui.” Where Aeschylus had seen the unfathomable ways of fate to which man could only conform, at the cost of sufferings such as those of Electra and Orestes, Sartre’s Oreste finds in the conquest of freedom the strength to rejoice in the very harshness of suffering. Whether we consider fate in the ontological manner of the Greeks or in the psychological manner of Racine, whose characters know that their fate is within and that it is an inner flaw that delivers them up to destiny (“Je me livre en aveugle au destin qui m’entraîne,” says Orestes in Andromaque), the concept of fate, wherever it occurs, contradicts man’s responsibility for the conduct of his life. Is not Sartre’s Orestes, then, “unfaithful” to the myth? And why did Sartre choose, in order to give the most dramatic expression to the moral imperative of selfliberation, the very myth that had previously embodied unfreedom? Precisely because the reversal itself was to carry signification additional to the message of freedom, though related to it. By his choice Sartre attracts attention to the fact that it is indeed Orestes, traditional victim of fate, who now becomes the carrier of freedom. It has been said that Sartre may have used the story of Orestes for his message of liberty as a cover against censorship by the German occupants. This explains the choice of a myth, but why precisely this myth? In my view it is because Sartre wished to stress and polarize the extreme distance between his own Oreste and Aeschylus’s Orestes. Mythology is a code. What is original and aesthetically satisfying, so that the spectator is most likely to perceive and receive it, is the very divergence from the classical story, the extreme tension within the familiar. These are but a few examples of transformations of Greek myth in modern drama, along various categories of paths. They show the interdependence of that which endures (a pattern of functional relations) and that which changes (the actorial, or scenographic, or symbolical, or ideological translation, to which stylistic translation should be added in further studies); and this interdependence always rests upon a new pact between an author and a spectator according to a “horizon of expectation” and a given historical conjuncture. Every work is defined both by what it preserves and what it transforms, in an admixture unique to itself. I have insisted, within the framework of the subject, upon paradigmatic relations established by a myth among a series of theatrical works. It was not my intention to reduce these dramatic texts to sets of

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relations but to indicate how each text becomes unique so that we may read it syntagmatically, as a very distinct phrase among others within the concert of literature.

works cited Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957. Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon 1949. Kushner, Eva. Le Mythe d’Orphée dans la littérature française contemporaine. Paris: Nizet 1961. – “Permanences et transformations des mythes grecs dans le théâtre moderne: quelques paramètres.” In Mythes, images, représentations. Paris: Didier-érudition 1981. 71–7. Levin, Harry. Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature. New York: Oxford University Press 1966. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon 1958. Piaget, Jean. Le Structuralisme. Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1968. Trousson, Raymond. Un problème de littérature comparée: les études de thème, essai de méthodologie. Paris: Lettres modernes 1965.

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27 Victor Segalen and China: A Dialectic of Reality and Imagination

There is a type of topic that today is no longer considered truly to pertain to the discipline of comparative literature: the kind that probes the overall impact of a foreign country and its literature upon a given author. In this case, if I were to write about the “influence” of China upon the early twentieth-century French poet Victor Segalen, or the image of China in his poetry, I would simply be contributing to the history of French literature the study of the poetic transformations of Segalen’s experiences of Chinese culture and travel in China. In other words, there would be much doubt of the reciprocity of the historical relation described. The obverse, however, is not true, since traditionally the impact and reception of a great writer upon the literature of countries outside his own does pose the truly comparative problem of the transcoding of a work into another national literature. Segalen’s poetry, however, is not of the kind that would have either a vast popular appeal for the writers and readers of another country or a contagious and compelling aesthetic. It might be argued more successfully that Segalen’s contacts with Chinese literature, thought, and art inspired him with an aesthetic that, in the context of pre–First World War French poetry, was innovative but

Invited paper read at the Second International Comparative Literature Conference in the Republic of China, TamKang College, Taipei, Taiwan, Aug. 1975. Published in TamKang Review 6.2–7.1 (Oct. 1975–April 1976): 59–87. All translations from the French are my own.

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whose true impact has made itself felt very gradually and is still being discovered by the poets and the reading community of today. From the methodological point of view, our binary problem may be of some value, on condition, first, that we do not content ourselves with eliciting a subjective and superficially exotic image of China, one that might have stimulated Segalen’s imagination but not truly transformed his experience and his expression of it; and secondly, that the Chinese reality (rather than some romantic, superficially picturesque French image of it) encountered symbolical equivalents in the poetic text itself – in other words, that a commutation occurred within Segalen’s poetry between its basic structures and the Chinese symbols and art forms it encountered, merging into poetic structures that can be universally meaningful. Segalen’s work lends itself particularly well to comparative studies, not only because of the cross-cultural transformations just mentioned but also because of the presence in his intellectual life and career of a steady and competent interest in arts other than poetry. With the composer Debussy, for example, he dreamt of a union of the arts – a fashionable idea at the turn of the century – a union that would link poetry and music. During his stays in China as a physician, explorer, and archaeologist Segalen conceived the ambition of translating through verbal means the forms of painting and sculpture. This aesthetic probing into correspondences between the arts might have occurred independently of Segalen’s Chinese experience; what I hope to show, however, is that it was on the contrary stimulated, enriched, and channelled by concepts of Chinese origin. The negative warning with which I began is one with which Segalen himself agreed so wholeheartedly that he might almost be called an unconscious forerunner of modern comparative theory. In this perspective, poetic language stems from a very personal prehension of the words and symbols common to all by the individual psyche; therefore the poem as an object of art is characterized by its difference – what modern linguistics would call écart or divergence – from the everyday experience of words and that which they describe. The poetic object stands to an important extent by itself in space and time. The intellectual activity enjoys a certain separateness, yet has applications in everyday life, whereas the work of art – say, the poem – transcends space and time in the manner of a milestone. “The poem is a closed system, lifted out of that of the little molecular and planetary ones. Again, it can be described as a milestone that would be immersed in a river, but so far away from the mainstream that it would not disturb the continuity of its flowing” (Imaginaires, 108). Although this could be superficially interpreted as an aesthetic of remoteness and detachment from the real,

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a kind of pure aestheticism of which the decadentist movement had just given numerous examples, what it really means is that poetry is implanted in the real through its very difference from the real. Segalen’s whole aesthetic is based upon the complementary nature of reality and what he calls “the imaginary.” To speak of Chinese “influences” upon his poetry apart from this aspect would therefore be to isolate the intercultural process that occurs in his poetry as well as in his aesthetic thought from their very mainsprings: the vision of a creative tension between the imaginary and the real. Any correspondence we can seek proceeds, not directly from Chinese reality and experience to the imaginary transformation in Segalen’s poetry but from his knowledge of Chinese works of imagination, permeated by Chinese thought, to the creations of his own imagination; and as such they can help us to understand the intercultural and interlingual dynamics of the poetic process as it occurs in the poetry of those who have stood at the crossroads of the history of nations. Let us first ask whether the example of Chinese thought has, in Segalen’s case, contributed to this aesthetic of division from the real and search for otherness – in other words, what Segalen in his own idiom calls “exoticism.” Poetry, in order to be true poetry, needs to be confronted with the real, as does the self in order to be fulfilled. Very early in his career Segalen turns away from “professional” writing, which in his case means the sensational sort of travelogue that would flatter the European reader’s sense of fashionable orientalism. It is clear that when Segalen prepares for his career as navy physician he turns to the study of Chinese language and civilization as a way to immerse himself in the wholly Other. If the best of Symbolism consisted in believing that, according to Rimbaud’s expression, “la vraie vie est ailleurs” and in leaping with Baudelaire “au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau,” then Segalen was truly turning away from the surface charms, prestige, and shimmer of the Symbolist school of poetry in an attempt to retrieve the profounder meaning of Symbolism. He was also shunning the fashionable exoticism of Loti and Farrère, for whom décors alone changed, while the core of their narrative plots, as well as their thought, remained stubbornly European. Segalen believed that this type of exoticism deals merely with appearances and not with the reality of otherness. Yet encountering the Other is, according to him, the human being’s and especially the poet’s most essential calling in life. It goes much beyond geographical displacement, towards the discovery of the essential diversity of the real and of oneself as a separate entity within the real: “The concept of the exotic is no other than that of the different; the perception of diversity; the knowledge that something is outside one’s self; and the power of exoticism,

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which is the power to conceive otherness” (Notes, 389). Once the poet is ready to encounter otherness in this spirit, the geographical and chronological determinations of his experience of the Other matter less than its intensity. This does not mean that the Other does not matter; it means, on the contrary, that the receptiveness of the true exoticist to that which is different from him has created the conditions of a true human encounter and confirmed the Other in its autonomous status as other. The poet’s ambition is therefore to let his apperception of the world, and especially of his Chinese discovery, “develop freely, joyfully, without bonds but also without strains; to grasp all the sensuous and intelligible riches that it will encounter in its expansion; and, feeding upon all reality, to beautify and enrich in turn all reality.” The creative principle behind this vision is that of the poet as a complete, liberated individual (a conception that may be situated at the crossroads of Nietzsche’s and Barrès’s concepts of the unusual personality). The paradoxical force of this idea comes from the fact that access to the universal is thought to reside in experiencing diversity in the uniqueness of every moment and aspect of experience; this represents the obverse of a Platonic conception of harmony, in which that which is changing and time-bound loses its importance and value. Segalen’s aesthetics and ethics of travel in time and space exalt otherness. This is complementary to cultivating individualism; it implies irreductibility of subjects one to another. On the one hand, the traveller does not adapt – that is, he does not abandon his individuality; on the other, far from being impervious, he lets himself be permeated by the experiences he encounters: “Exoticism is therefore not adjustment; it is not a perfect understanding of that which is outside oneself and would become embraced within oneself; but the acute and immediate grasp of the eternally incomprehensible! Let us therefore start from this impenetrability. Let us not claim to assimilate customs, races, nations, others; but let us rejoice in our inability to do so” (390). This shows why Segalen’s is a privileged case for comparative East-West studies: his intention (and we shall control this by a study of the result of his intention) is not to reduce the Other to the same but to approach it as the wholly Other; a Westerner, he neither pretends to retrieve Western concepts in Eastern ones he encounters nor to assimilate the Eastern to the Western, a practice of which he accuses Claudel, who, according to him, asks too many questions and eventually annexes to his spiritual organization everything that is not susceptible of assimilation – i.e., that is basically exotic and original (Bouillier, 10). Such, then, is Segalen’s attitude towards Chinese culture as well as to the other cultures he undertook to explore, including the Maori. To ensure that he will discover China in the objective and naturalistic way

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he claims is appropriate to the discovery of the wholly Other, he will, in fact, become a sinologist, learn the language, undertake several archaeological explorations, and write a book on Chinese sculpture. His aesthetic, conceived as a dialectic tension between the “same” and the “other,” ensures a maximum of receptiveness to his explorations. To him, China is part of the real, an immense domain that it is for mankind to enjoy and to transform through imagination. Significantly, the dialectic of reality and imagination assumes in Segalen’s mind the form of a Chinese symbolic seal: The entwined reciprocity of the two “commas” forming the Tao, one white, the other black, equal, symmetrical, neither ever victorious over the other. This symbol is a well-worn one. Its common translation is Yin and Yang, female and male …; this opposition and penetration, which, according to the classics of the tenth century, begat the world, are also capable of containing everything in the world we can imagine. My journey and the purpose of my journey are easily enclosed and uplifted in this symbol. The invented is the white and male, the multi-coloured breath. The real will be the black, feminine mass of night. (Équipée, 403–4)

The meaning of the two creative principles and of their reciprocal tension is valid, I believe, for poets of both cultures, but it should be emphasized that in the case of Segalen the discovery of this tension is a pioneering experience among the poets and writers of his period in France, including Huysmans, whose admirer he was, and the poets of the Symbolist school, to whom he devoted his thesis, “Les Cliniciens ès-lettres.” By and large the tendency (which we may view in a wide perspective as an extension of Romanticism) was to seek refuge from the real in the imaginary and thus to locate in the latter the aesthetic and metaphysical values that one despaired of finding in the former. This is precisely what Segalen does not do, as all his biographers testify. In particular, the discovery of China is the epitome of exoticism in the sense we already indicated – that is, as the most intense possible discovery of the real inspired and illuminated by the imaginary, in order to discover, in and through the journey, one’s own self expanded: “In China, grappling with that most antipodic of materials, I expect a great deal from this intensified exoticism” (quoted in Bédouin, 56). The dialectic maintenance of the imaginary and the real carries with itself certain important poetic consequences, and these should be viewed as illustrations, perhaps as proofs, of the fact that the Greek heritage was as abhorrent to Segalen as it had been to other rebels against European philosophy, including the painter Gauguin, whose last dwelling and ultimate work Segalen was the first to discover in

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Tahiti. There he had become contaminated with Gauguin’s love and enjoyment of a many-splendoured world. The first of these poetic consequences is that the real is not a mere reflection of the ideal. It is stubbornly there. A prime image of this in the early 1900s, when Segalen was engaged in archaeological expeditions, was the resistance of distance and the material difficulties of transportation in a territory still devoid of highways: “L’étape devient reine du temps bien employé sur la route” (Équipée, 372). It is the obstacle encountered on one’s way that structures each day most concretely, rather than the abstract contour of the geographical map, or the even and abstract kilometer. Each “li” is a conquest. It is the distance covered by a pedestrian in one hour, but it refuses to be quantified. Only the unforeseen, the uncalculated can be so utterly different from the event as planned and imagined, and therefore offers the traveller a true challenge. Mountain-climbing provides an even closer image of the importance of the individual obstacle as a separate happening within the real. The traveller who has conquered a lengthy climb and, reaching a pass, can look over to the other side has grasped what Segalen calls the total instant. He has in a glimpse a new perspective upon the world, one that is uniquely his own, due to the vantagepoint he has conquered by his effort: The glimpse across the mountain-pass is but a glimpse; but so pregnant with fullness that in order to express it we cannot sever the triumph of words from that of the exhilarated muscles; nor can we separate that which we see from that which we breathe. One instant, yes, but a total one. And it almost seems that the mountain exists solely in order that its utilitarian heaviness might not be negated. All the detours of the climb, all the disappointments with the means that were used – these grudges are tossed away over one’s shoulder. Nothing exists at that moment except the moment itself. (381)

Beyond images of the Chinese earth and its discovery by the foreign traveller, is there any deeper reason for pointing to an Oriental rather than a Greek affinity in Segalen’s manner of exalting the real? In my view this reason exists, and it is of a philosophical nature. The tension between what he calls the imaginary and the real is akin to that between the material and the spiritual. That tension, in Segalen’s thinking, is kept alive and makes the dichotomy irreducible because neither term can be subordinated to the other. In Platonism, for example, it is easily seen that matter loses its reality to the ideal upon the scale of being; in fact, the ideal alone possesses being, while matter, in the last analysis, has no being, is not, but becomes; but the flux of becoming is as devoid of value as it is of being. At the same time, in materialist phi-

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losophies it is the ideal that is devoid of being, since it is viewed as an epiphenomenon upon the surface of matter triumphant. For Segalen, neither type of philosophy prevails, for he believes being itself to be unknowable, and his two domains, the real as well as the imaginary, are divergent manifestations of a beyond that man can never know. This is close to some of the Taoist intuitions, especially where they are parallel to those of Buddhism. For example, when Seng-hao, in the Book of Chao, identifies action and non-action; or when Lao-Tse himself says that “being and non-being beget each other.” Tao appears to shun an artificial, rationalistic merging of contraries that occurs when they are subordinated to one another. Again, the Taoist and Buddhist conception of unity in diversity, and of the identification of the particular with the universal, was attractive to Segalen inasmuch as he would not see diversity abolished but, on the contrary, exacerbated and intensified, though he too views it in the wide context of a universal process. But the dialectical tension of the imaginary and the real also has another consequence, which is the obverse of the first, namely that the imaginary realm remains as indestructible as everyday reality itself. Segalen only emphasizes the specificity of the real so insistently because, under the symbolist influence against which he is reacting, and also perhaps by dint of intellectual temperament, his intimate temptation is the ideal realm, that “elsewhere” of Rimbaud’s and “anywhere out of the world” of Baudelaire’s, which to their followers often mean escape, but to Segalen, the yeast of perpetual transformation of the given. The artist’s imagination represents the most active, intense, and creative manifestation of this aspect of the phenomenon of man. The artist’s vision, according to Segalen in Peintures, is an “inebriated vision”; we might equate it with Jung’s concept of the visionary activity. Here is the story that introduces the Peintures sequence, a series of verbal transformations or transpositions of Chinese paintings – perhaps real, perhaps imaginary – into poetry: A master-painter, in the time of Song, was wont to dwell upon the hillsides, with a small bottle of wine, and to spend the day in a state of slight intoxication, gazing on and meditating. And do you know what it was he gazed upon? A spectacle of course, since he was Master and painter. The commentators’ translation has it that he “sought the bond uniting forever joy and life, life and joy, and they mocked him for being a drunkard and a madman.” Yet this inebriated vision, this penetrating look, this prophetic grasp, can replace for some – among whom you are – the raison d’être of the world and of the godhead. (169)

The reader is invited (and we should appreciate the modernity of this pre-war intuition) to move with the poet-painter into invented space;

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to “re-enact each of the depicted actions” (170); to become the creator’s accomplices. In other words, the world of imagination, far from belonging to the artist alone, is shared by the reader-spectator through participation in the work of art. But what is the relationship between this fragile creation, the work of art, so intermittent since it needs a receptor in order to be made alive again, and reality as such? “This,” says Segalen in Peintures, “is the painting of Spirits and Genii and Immortals. All that is pictured here is made concrete only by the pleasure it takes in being seen. It then deigns to become apparent. But beware: a single breath can also make it disappear” (175). Are we then to think of Segalen as a pure aesthete, along the lines of the Huysmans of the decadentist period whom he just then admired? One might think so on the basis of a personal letter to Claudel written in March 1915: “I cannot formulate my belief in one sentence but I can feel what it is. A purely aesthetic faith, an exclusive search for beauty, a permanent desire forever to reach out for beauty, to embody reflections of it in one’s thoughts, one’s actions, and above all one’s works; and this without ever pretending to embrace or determine or crystallize beauty … I only hope not to die without having told others how I conceive this beautiful and illusory world” (quoted in Bouillier, 272). Rather than glorification of art for art’s sake, art disembodied, is this not simply a praise of beautiful works as the highest possible experience accessible to mankind, since the essence of beauty is as unknowable as the truth itself? We do not know that which Kant called the thing in itself in the noumenal world, but only fragile embodiments of it in the world of phenomena. Artistic creation is man’s victory over finiteness, but it is victory in a sense that could be understood as Taoist because it proceeds from a victory over the cry of self; because being and non-being coexist in the work of art in a very real sense. Before the Chinese cycle in his life and work, Segalen had gone through what his critics call a cycle of the heroes. It consisted of works either in the form of lyrical drama (Siddharta and Orphée-Roi) or of idealized biography (Le Maître du jouir, intended to have been a biography of Paul Gauguin). In each case the hero was a dominant personality – whether mythical or historical – embodying in some important sense the creative powers of man. Buddha, Orpheus, Christ were, according to Segalen, because he rejected the very substance of religiosity, creators of religion: through them he meant to show that all religions were of man’s making. He thus places himself in a position quite antithetical to that of the Renaissance philosophers in Europe and in general all those thinkers in whose eyes the prisci theologi of all religions are linked by the historical transmission of the substance of their beliefs, whose outward differences cover their secret unity. For

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these thinkers all religions are fundamentally one because of the sameness of their content; to Segalen, on the contrary, they are the same because of their ultimate lack of content. But this makes the creators of religions even greater as benefactors of mankind and heroes of the imaginary world: do they not provide men with the most grandiose of their dreams? Hence a negative and pathetic equivalence of Buddha and Orpheus as heroes of two pre-war lyrical dramas originally written as libretti for Debussy, who never composed the music promised to Segalen. Is the Buddha-Orpheus equivalence based only on an idiosyncracy of Segalen’s, or does it have a basis in the respective cultures from which these figures emerge? It seems to me that the desire to cling to the humanity of the founder as much as the accounts allow is a guarantee in this respect. There is nothing self-denying in Segalen’s ethical philosophy, and it would be wrong to claim that he ever agreed with much of Buddhism. What he does admire in Siddharta is the immense human energy required to overcome the human in himself because, as Segalen expresses it, “man is something that should be overcome.” To him Siddharta represents this supremely human overcoming, but his motivation does not coincide with that of Buddhism, nor for that matter with the ultimate motivation of Taoism, if we consider the latter to cultivate a sense of totality in which contradiction tends to be abolished, because then, the ethical, Nietzschean objective of Segalen’s heroes, including Siddharta, would appear both desirable and undesirable, but at any rate not uniquely desirable. Segalen does not appear to assimilate Buddhism any more than he does Orphism; he defines his aesthetic and his ethical ideal (and the relationships between these) in reaction to both these tendencies – which is, pragmatically speaking, one of the workings of what used to be called “influence.” But he also selects that which has profound affinities with his poetic and irremediably European imagination. For example, the sense of sympathy for the differentiated and fragmented (and does not every poetic imagination have empathy with Tao in penetrating and linking minute and specific elements of the real?): We might say that Segalen tunes in to the aesthetic implications of Tao without experiencing or wishing to experience the quietude that is thought to be knowledge of being-in-itself (être pour soi, ming) and that shuns all agitation. With the Taoist, sympathy for the created follows the attainment of what constitutes the experience of non-being: the illumination and the simplicity. Segalen’s apprehension of Tao remains solely intellectual; it is not our purpose, however, to appraise his personal experience, but to probe that which stimulates his imagination and provides an example of poetic reception and transformation.

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It is at the level of universal sympathy and of its manifestations that Segalen shows a striking kinship with the Taoist conception. Tao cannot be expressed, but its infinitely diverse manifestations can be, and it is, furthermore, in this realm of signs that poetry assumes its place. The stèle, originally a funeral monument meant to carry an inscription, and which Segalen translates into lapidary poetry, can serve as a prime example of the importance of signs in a world where, since being is unknowable, man is surrounded and guided by signs alone, poetry being a network of signs in the second degree, corresponding to the first and yet self-subsistent. An excellent example of this is the poem “Nom caché,” the last of the Stèles: The true Name is not that which gilds the portals, and makes actions illustrious … The true Name is not to be read in the palace itself nor in the gardens and grottoes, but remains hidden in the waters beneath the aqueduct vault where I quench my thirst. When emptiness prevails at the heart of the underground, and in the underground of the heart … under the vault the Name becomes revealed. But let the cruel waters rush forth, let life overflow, let the devastating torrent come, rather than knowledge. (271)

Although at the episodic level the hidden name is that of Peking, which was not written in any visible place but only in the aqueduct that brought to the palace the water of the fountain of jade, it is obvious that the palace underground is likened to that of the human consciousness, and that along that isotopy we can also look for another, more universally sovereign meaning of the name that only appears in the depths. The conclusion ought to be that man should reach out for the deeper revelation. The ironic conclusion, however, is that man shuns this knowledge and wishes for the secret to be destroyed by the swelling of the torrent and the explosion of life, since the knowledge of the secret would kill all illusion. H. Bouillier has skillfully summed up the way in which this poem epitomizes Segalen’s attitude towards the unknowable, and his affinity with the Chinese philosophers upon whom he has meditated: “The hidden Name, which seemed at first to be the poet’s secret sign, took on, as various corrections were made in the course of composition, an infinitely vaster meaning. The hidden Name in fact covers the supreme ontological reality that Segalen designates elsewhere as the Prince of Absence, of whom it is said on the last

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page of Équipée that ‘he remains proudly unknown.› To know absence one has to identify with it through the mystical experience of nothingness and night. It is significant that from the formal point of view this poem became more and more elliptic, as if to bear witness to the supreme ellipse of silence itself. It appears, therefore, that, to Segalen, the imaginary realm and activity of the human mind constitute a beyond, what he calls an “arrièremonde,” an immense storehouse of meaning that it is for the artist to recapture in his work and thus to reinsert into reality. There is a living osmosis between the real and the imagined, because the imagined is not the unreal but a more vivid rendering of the real. Furthermore, the freedom, creativity, and drive of the imagination restore to reality that which the artist has drawn from it. Here Segalen achieves a spontaneous rapprochement between a very modern Western grasp of the role and nature of the imagination and a Chinese conception. It has been a frequent tendency of Western thought (up to and including Jean-Paul Sartre) to consider the image an inferior, degraded form of representation. More recent attempts at elaborating an anthropology of imagination have endowed it with more positive value and claim to herald “un sens des métaphores, ce grand sémantisme de l’imaginaire qui est la matrice originelle à partir de laquelle toute pensée rationalisée et son cortège sémiologique se déploie” (Durand, 30). In this perspective the image, far from being a degraded form of thought, or as Freudian and even Adlerian psychoanalytic theory have it, a degraded emotion (in that it arises as a by-product of repression), possesses a dynamic of its own. As Durand says, “images do not draw their value from the libidinous roots they conceal but from the poetic and mythical flowers they reveal.” Segalen appears to have foreseen this emphasis upon the value of imagination and shares it with German Romanticism and French Surrealism, as well as with the sector of modern anthropology concerned with imagination. This attitude to imagination also coincides with a tendency akin, as we saw, to that of Tao, to compensate for the unknowability of being by a love for the concrete and the differentiated that in turn calls for artistic creation. Again, it is considered, in the case of poetry, that the hidden meaning of nature will “manifest itself spontaneously and directly in poetic language” (Chung-Yuan, 153). In order to reach this immediate expressiveness, it is not enough for the poem to reflect nature. Again Segalen merges with many a modern aesthetic in shunning the concept of art as reflecting reality. But a distinction must be drawn between the aesthetic consequence (the existence of verbal objects created wholly from the interrelationships of their constituent elements) and the process of creation. Concerning the former, there is a striking

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convergence between Segalen’s thought and its basis in the Chinese respect for the sign, on the one hand, and on the other the presentday emphasis on the relative freedom of signifier from signified. Concerning the latter, that is, in regard to the involvement of personal ethics in the process of creation, it would rather seem that Segalen, with his antecedents, including the Chinese, stands at the end of a long tradition. For him, in conformity with Taoist thought, the work of art could not exist without the personal commitment of the artist, which the poem communicates to the reader: “The role of the poet is to make the reader participate in his inner experience and to introduce him in turn into the kingdom of serenity” (Peintures, 160). The reader is to be carried by the rhythmic flux into the depths of the original “indeterminacy” that gave birth to the poetic form. The subjectivity of the reader and the objectivity that the poet has conquered can merge without the poet’s personal intervention. This is called the principle of immediacy: the poet dwells in his poem as a person, yet not as an egocentric person. What is manifested in the poem at all levels (phonological, symbolic, ideational) is that essential self that meditation has brought out. This enables us to understand both why so much of the material substance of the world enters a poem and why the poem is nevertheless alleviated of the world. As T’ao Ch’ien (373–427) wrote in one of his poems: I built my house in the world of man And yet I hear no noise of horses or carriages.

If the identification of aesthetic with ontological experience is the case in an important sector of traditional Chinese poetry, it is also true in the case of painting. All the characteristics we have mentioned – involvement of the poet in the work of art, purification of experience through the work of art, as well as an aesthetic of condensation and reduction to the quintessential – are applied by Segalen to all forms of art, and to that extent he was (metaphorically speaking!) predestined to encounter Chinese thought upon art; when he did encounter it, he applied it to his own art. I should like to take two examples from Segalen’s poetry in which the interaction of the imagined and the real can be said to proceed from his understanding of and empathy with Chinese art forms. The book of poems entitled Peintures is in itself, as we saw, a venture to make the imaginary more real and to bring reality closer to the imaginary by creating a verbal art in which the colours, forms, and rhythms normally offered to sight are suggested instead of being shown by direct pictorial means. The artist unfolds the scrolls of Chinese paint-

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ings, not before the reader’s eyes but before his imagination. In other words, Segalen’s idea of this kind of poetry of transposition is (appearances to the contrary) the obverse of the sort of description prescribed by the Parnassian school. Description tends to be exhaustive; Segalen, by contrast, requires the reader to recreate the vision on the basis of a suggested sight.1 And such is also Chinese painting. It stems from reality but provides the artist (and the spectator) with a language of symbolic signs that have, so to say, absorbed reality; thus the work of art, far from substituting itself to the reality of nature in a representational sense, forms an ideal space offered the spectator in order that he may retrieve nature through it, in his mind: In the symbolic language of which the elements of the landscape are but conventional signs, mountains, trees, human beings are not portrayed according to the relationships by which they are linked in reality; they are disposed in a space which is inherent to the composition as the artist has willed it and destined it to express his personal vision. For the Chinese painter, this space is the ether which envelops and unites all things, the void which should enable the mind to realize its potentialities. It is elicited … by means of naked surfaces and also by the effects of haze, fog or clouds. Details become useless for a painting is but a canvass suggesting a theme which the spectator completes in his imagination; a theoretician of painting has written: The greatest perfection should be imperfect, / The greatest abundance should appear empty. / Then only will it be inexhaustible in its effect. (quoted in Cohn, 16)

In Peintures Segalen similarly conveys this spiritualization of space. Each poem is the imaginary unfolding of a painted scroll in which spaces are viewed successively rather than simultaneously, and in which the technicalities of perspective are less important than one stroke of the brush, because of all the suggestion the latter may hold for the viewer. Segalen wholly adopts this sobriety of means: “And resolutely refrain from counting upon any predictable ‘effect’; any of these fleeting mirages which Western ‘perspective’ plays and decides upon so securely: whether or not parallels meet in infinity” (167). He invites the reader-spectator to consider the poem “an appeal, an evocation, a

1 The reproach that might be levelled against his poetics (and critics might add: his practice of poetry) is that the Chinese painting and its imaginary unfolding intervene too massively and directly, and that no true “transcoding” has taken place until the first code intervenes in the second indirectly, almost secretly. Stèles goes much further towards fulfilling this: the stele is an empty stone, to be inscribed.

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spectacle” that beckons him not to remain outside the work of art but to re-enact it through his own vision: “To see as seeing is conceived here is to participate in the painter’s gesture of drawing; it is to move in the pictorial space; to appropriate each of the painted acts” (170). This quest on the part of the Chinese painter for the very quintessence of a spectacle in nature has led, in aesthetic theory, to a codification that in turn warrants timelessness. Won Tao-Tseu, “prince of painting,” was sent to Setchuan by his emperor to study landscape but brought back no sketches, while his rival came back laden with documents. Yet it was Won Tao-Tseu who painted a masterpiece, as was his wont. “Everything is in my heart,” he said, and this became a canon of painting. The spiritualization of percepts is translated by Segalen into a dynamic concept of being in which single images lose their fixedness, all reality merges into a universal motion that rejoins Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of a space-time continuum. Reality is process; events are freed of their static contours, and we can sense them in relation to the universe as a whole; this Segalen translates, for example, by the image of a procession of old men proceeding, paradoxically, in swift motion: “The air is their favourite environment: winged chariots, the swift rhythm of the flag which is whipped from both sides and rushes on; it is motion itself in the intelligent sky: everything brims over with fluidity, like a pulsatile ship; everything is in motion; the sky, like a heart, is beating” (176). Segalen’s context appears to be that of Oriental spirituality, pertaining more particularly to the Taoist doctrine of the mutual abolition of opposites, rather than that of Western philosophical speculation. This viewing of the scroll is akin to the experience of a meditation in which the self also loses its static and egocentric identity within the process of reality: Look once more. After a while one would wish to see no more, to wipe one’s eyes … Each of the figures, even projected ten thousand feet into space, is neatly outlined, posed, finished. But our unease comes precisely from understanding now that everything moves and pulsates in the deepest indifference. This genius can vibrate equally in one direction or in another. The esplanade itself is ready to take its flight, and the rocks, to dissolve in the clouds. Everything can make a complete turn-about; nothing will change; these old men will become children, and these new-borns, old men. All is one. Two is not two. Everything dances; everything sparkles; everything is ready to roll into a spiral like the great universal wind. Therefore everything expresses itself in spirit. And think of it: this painting, born of the brush of an ancient master in the time of Tang, by dint of being at all, is spirit. (176–7)

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A faithful portrait would be not one that reproduces the subject’s physical appearance in all its details but rather one that provides the viewer’s mind with an already spiritualized access to the inner reality of the subject. Here is the portrait of a woman: “The painter shows her gentler here than the other is in human existence, for he painted her according to his love” (178). Another poem in which Segalen suggests a progression of levels of reality advancing in an obverse relationship to that of appearances is “Paysage” (“Landscape”). The importance of landscape painting in traditional Chinese art is well known; in fact, the landscape stood in importance above portrait and still-life painting in the traditional division of genres. Yet in this poem the landscape itself is only an appearance for a hidden reality – that of man, though there are no obvious inhabitants in the landscape: Great vistas of land and sky … The plain, barely accepted, flavourful, necessary; it is ploughed, sown, harvested, but only seldom is it painted. No human beings here, or just enough for a touch of human stature. But do not conclude that man is absent or the painter powerless to create a likeness of his neighbour: it is you, the spectators, who like pantomimes must play the part of man, thus: the snippet of sky that is visible is a bonnet over your forehead. The bark of the mountain comes to cover your eyes with its broad mask. The two mountainsides, favourable to echoes, surround your ears. There are no men besides yourselves. But if the landscape is viewed as befits it, it is really no other than the immense face of man, and its skin has apertures for the senses. (196)

By this paradigmatic linking of landscape and human features Segalen captures the kinship of all physical appearances. Tradition gives priority to the landscape, but the landscape itself is humanized in painting, in the same way that man’s and woman’s features are naturalized when made to rejoin universal models. Both visual series are thus spiritualized. This is what makes all the more imperative the first two principles of Sie Ho (sixth century): 1. To grasp the vital rhythm. 2. To render the essential structure of the line.

The principle of resemblance of the model, and that of the judicious use of media, as well as that of careful use of space in composition, come only third, fourth, and fifth respectively. In this sense again there occurs in Segalen’s work an elevation of reality to poetic imagination, corresponding in a functional way to fundamental Chinese aesthetic concepts.

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Before leaving the internalization of painting in Segalen’s poetry and its basis in Chinese aesthetics, we should remember the numerous instances in the history of Chinese pictorial art in which writing and drawing or painting are considered two aspects of the same activity. Whether it is the interdependence of painting and calligraphy according to Tchang-Yen-Yuan (critic of the ninth century), who points out the complementarity of the two arts (those who could not write in characters expressed themselves in painting and vice-versa), or the fact that at any rate a Chinese picture as representation of an object tends towards the stylization that marked the passage from the pictogram to the ideogram; or again the spiritualization of painting in the T’ang period under the combined influence of Taoism and the Tch’an sect, to the point where under the Emperor Houei-tsong painting became one of the compulsory tests for obtaining official government positions – in every case poetry and painting are akin to each other far more than in ordinary European practice. It is in this spirit that Segalen’s narrator creates poetic objects that by their spiritual nature, and not only their subject-matter, can appeal to the Chinese imagination as well as to the European. We can therefore conclude with Bouillier that Segalen in Peintures attempts to reconcile the visionary lesson of Rimbaud with Claudel’s endeavour to reconstruct Chinese reality in a poetic manner: Like Claudel, Segalen is a man who knows how to see and to render the sight of the real in the fullness of its density. His love and knowledge of painting allow him to judge and gauge the forms and colours of what he sees. But he has drawn from Taoism a lesson dear to his heart, one of which he had a foreboding when he studied Buddhism and the spectacular aesthetics of Jules de Gaultier, that of the illusory habits of the world. His task in Peintures was therefore, without betrayal of the real, to suggest a perpetual sliding from the concrete towards the intangible, from the spectacle seen fully to the spectacle barely caught in a glimpse. Without departing from Chinese reality, he expresses a world that constantly borders upon phantasy, a visionary world as confusing in its own way as that of the Illuminations. (Bouillier, 309–10)

Bouillier concludes that Peintures, after Stèles, embodies the very formula of Segalen’s personal imaginary world. To this I would add that the most personal, through a verbal and symbolic network where two arts and two cultures meet, tends towards the most universal. Although in Stèles the art that is transposed into poetry is another art yet – sculpture – it can be said that the process of poetic transmutation is parallel to that which occurs in Peintures. From the visual and therefore spatial point of view, phenomena are again stylized and given a

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common mould; from the temporal point of view as well, the fleeting individuality of phenomena is, paradoxically, given permanence by the stele form. Thus, stone comes to life, while life lends itself to the stillness and solidity of stone so that its message will endure; once more Segalen’s poetry, in what is considered his best work, feeds upon a Taolike paradox. The imaginary sculpture assumes the formal rigour of those poetic genres (like the haiku or the sonnet) that are limited and disciplined by their brevity. With its phonic qualities it also constantly appeals to the visual, but only to negate it. The symbolic rather than the anecdotic is stressed. There is no attempt to “transpose” sculpture. The poem is to the real monument as a sign to meaning. What we must remember, however, is that in poetry this is not an abstract process but a complex set of relations, offered to the resurrection of meaning, an absence concealing an elusive presence. For Segalen this refers to an ontological reality. The stele exists because through it the self becomes abolished: Pour atteindre l’être, le cinquième, Centre et Milieu Qui est moi Perdre le midi quotidien. (137)

Thus the poetry of Segalen offers a significant, though not a spectacular example of the manner in which, through the dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity, the microcosm that is the poem can, in a moment of grace, mirror both East and West in the reciprocity of imagination.

works cited Bédouin, Jean-Louis. Victor Segalen. Paris: Seghers 1963. Bouillier, H. Victor Segalen. Paris: Mercure de France 1961. – Introduction to Victor Segalen, Imaginaires. Chung-Yuan, Chang. Creativity and Taoism. New York: Julian Press 1963. Cohn, W. La Peinture chinoise. Paris: Phaidon 1948. Durand, G. Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire. Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1963. Segalen, Victor. Stèles, Équipée, Peintures. Paris: Club du Meilleur Livre 1955. – “Notes sur l’exotisme.” In Mercure de France, Mar. 1955. – Stèles. Ed. H. Bouillier. Paris: Plon 1963. – Imaginaires. Paris: Rougerie 1972.

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Index of Names

Aaron, Raymond, 79, 91 Achebe, Chinua, 15 Aeschylus, 295, 297, 306, 308–9 Agacinski, Sylviane, 206 Alberti, Leone Battista, 102, 235 Althusser, Louis, 84 Andersen, Hans Christian, 285–6 Angenot, Marc, 57–8, 67, 122, 136 Ankersmit, F.R., 129–30 Anouilh, Jean, 82, 292, 297–8, 302, 306–7 Apollonius of Rhodes, 297 Ariès, Philippe, 234 Aristotle, 109, 217, 240, 259 Arnold, Matthew, 269 Arthur, Prince, 237 Ascham, Roger, 238 Augustijn, Cornelius, 217 Bachelard, Gaston, 167 Baïf, Jean-Antoine de, 221 Bakhtin, Mikhaïl, 35, 193 Bál, Mieke, 66 Balachov, N.I., 120 Barrès, Maurice, 314

Barsky, Robert F., 58 Barthes, Roland, 58, 132, 283 Baudelaire, Charles, 258, 313, 317 Bayle, Pierre, 132, 245 Begag, Azouz, 284 Ben Porat, Zhiva, 252 Berlyne, Daniel, 283 Bernheimer, Charles, 41–2 Bessière, Jean, 28 Beti, Mongo, 15, 110 Bettelheim, Bruno, 288 Biddle, Arthur, 139 Blake, William, 270 Blodgett, E.D., 59 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 103, 194 Bodin, Jean, 159, 196 Boer, Inge E., 66 Bokdam, Sylviane, 193 Bolgar, R.R., 292 Booth, Wayne, 25 Borgés, Jorge Luis, 145 Bortolussi, Marisa, 36 Boscán, Juan, 155, 231 Bouillier, H., 314, 318, 320, 326 Bourgogne, Henri de, 212 Brandt-Corstius, J., 78

Brantlinger, Patrick, 45–6 Braudel, Fernand, x, 134, 159 Brochu, André, 46 Brooks, Peter, 43, 46 Brués, Guy de, 197 Brunel, Pierre, 34 Brunetière, Fernand, 90, 113 Bruni, Leonardo, 157 Bucer, Martin, 195 Buddha, 318–19 Burckhardt, Jacob, 157, 186 Buzon, Fréderic de, 167–8 Byron, 142 Cadava, Eduardo, 136 Calderón, Pedro de la Barca, 297 Calvin, Jean, 102, 143, 186, 262 Camara, Amalia Iniesta, 145 Castiglione, Baldassare, 243 Cave, Terence, 187, 218 Certeau, Michel de, 45 Chamard, Henri, 147 Chambers, E.K., 236 Chand, Prem, 254

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Chavy, Paul, 53 Chevrel, Yves, 34 Chung-Yuan, 321 Cicero, 158 Claudel, Paul, 314, 318, 326 Claudon, Francis, 146 Clements, Robert, 34 Cocteau, Jean, 81–2, 297– 8, 301–2, 305–7 Coeur, Jacques, 176 Cohn, W., 323 Coleridge, Samuel, 269 Collingwood, R.G., 91–2, 120, 171 Colón, 180–1 Colonna, Vittoria, 125, 223 Columbus, Christopher, 180–1 Comenius, Jan Amos, 132, 245, 253 Comte, Auguste, 167 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 175– 6 Coppet, groupe de, 32 Corneille, Pierre, 297 Cortázar, Julio, 145 Costa, Rogério Lima da, 145 Croce, Benedetto, 79, 85, 91 Culler, Jonathan, 60, 66, 156 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 93 Cusa, Nicolas of, 159, 196 Danset-Léger, Jacqueline, 282–3 Dante, 103, 258 Debussy, Claude, 312, 318 Delumeau, Jean, 175–6 Derrida, Jacques, 35, 45, 60 Descartes, René, 167–9, 177, 203–4, 207, 255 Des Périers, Bonaventure, 195 Diderot, Denis, 132, 245 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 95 Dimi´c, Milan, 53 Dole3el, Lubomír, 27, 37, 61 Donne, John, 262

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 169, 193 Doubrovsky, Serge, 116 Drouot, Paul, 292 Du Bellay, Joachim, 12, 155, 221, 229 Du Guillet, Pernette, 223 Durand, Gilbert, 296, 321 *urisin, Dioný3, 36, 124 Echeruo, Michael, 294 Egmondanus, 218 Elizabeth i, 125, 157, 238 Eluard, Paul, 254 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 208, 237 Emmanuel, Pierre, 251, 281, 292 Erasmus, Desiderius, ix, 102, 188, 195, 198–200, 202, 204, 207–19, 237– 8, 240, 242–5 Escarpit, Denise, 123, 284 Étaples, Jacques Lefèvre d’, 102 Euripides, 295, 297, 306 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 122, 128 Farrère, Claude, 313 Faucher, Paul, 283 Faulkner, William, 258 Febvre, Lucien, 80 Ferguson, Margaret W., 157–8 Ferrand, Jacques, 222 Ficino, Marsilio, 102 Finlay, Marike, 165 Firenzuola, Agnolo, 240 Fish, Stanley, 60 Fokkema, Douwe, 67, 130 Foucault, Michel, 58, 159, 169, 170–1, 181–2, 200, 202–5, 216 Frazer, James George, 304 Frelick, Nancy, 157 Freud, Sigmund, 81, 114 Froben, Johann, 212, 243 Frye, Northrop, viii, 16–17, 25, 35, 47, 54, 129, 131, 135–6, 160, 168, 172, 191–2, 249–64, 266–75, 285, 288, 294, 304, 307

Gadamer, Hans Georg, viii, 140 Gair, Reavley, 237 Gasset, Ortega y, 144 Gates, Henry Louis, 43–4 Gauguin, Paul, 315–16, 318 Gaultier, Jules de, 326 Gellius, Aulus, 208 Genot, Gérard, 229 Gibbon, Edward, 135–6 Gide, André, 90, 297 Gillon, Adam, 141 Gilman, Donald, 200 Giraudoux, Jean, 297–8, 306 Godelier, Maurice, 84 Godzich, Wlad, 13–14, 138 Goethe, Wolfgang, 111, 297 Goldmann, Lucien, 94, 114, 121 Gorki, Maxim, 254 Greenblatt, Stephen, 136, 178–9, 180, 182, 204–5 Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 293 Guillén, Claudio, 26, 37, 74, 86, 123, 191–2 Gutenberg, Johann, 115 Guthrie, William, 296 Gutman, Huck, 203 Guy, Alain, 239 Ha, Kim Ji, 14 Habermas, Jürgen, 58 Hamburger, Käte, 294–5 Hamilton, A.C., 260 Hasenclever, Walter, 297–8, 301 Hatzfield, Helmut, 93–4 Hayne, David, 55 Hegel, Georg, 12, 90, 92, 171 Heh, Pak No, 14 Heidegger, Martin, 166, 254 Henry, Michel, 207 Henry viii, 237 Herder, Johann, 12 Highet, Gilbert, 81–2, 90, 290, 292, 301, 305

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Hofmannsthal, 82, 297–8, 301 Holbein, Hans, 219 Homer, 261 Horace, 279 Houei-tsong, Emperor, 326 Humboldt, Alexander von, 12, 32 Hus, Jan, 143, 170, 175, 183–5 Husserl, Edmund, 168 Hutcheon, Linda, 117, 147, 159, 254 Hutton, Patrick, 203 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 315, 318 Innocenti, Roberto, 286 Jakobson, Roman, 75, 112, 121 Jameson, Frederic, 79, 80, 138–9 Jardine, Lisa, 218–19 Jauss, H.R., 30, 72, 86, 140 Jean, Georges, 281 Joan of Arc, 175, 185 Jodelle, Etienne, 221 Johnson, Samuel, 269 Johnston, Alexandra, 236 Jolles, André, 296 Jost, François, 34 Jouve, Pierre-Jean, 292 Jung, Carl, 304, 317 Kafka, Franz, 124, 258 Kahn, Victoria, 197–8 Kanagaki, Robun, 254 Kant, Immanuel, 318 Katharine of Spain, 237 Kawatake, Toshi, 254 Kennedy, George A., 48 Kepler, Johannes, 175 Kibédi-Varga, A., 133 Kierkegaard, Søren, 206 Kingsley, Charles, 287 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, 235 Kochanowski, Jan, 155 Kokoschka, Oskar, 297–8, 302, 307–8 Komarsky, E.G., 142

Kristeva, Julia, 26, 165 Kroll, Virginia, 284 Krysinski, Wladimir, 62, 165, 168–9, 191 Krzyzanowski, Ludwik, 141 Kundera, Milan, 17 Kushner, Eva, 302 Labé, Louise, 223 Lacan, Jacques, 180 Lambert, José, 27, 36 Lanson, Gustave, 72, 90 Lao-Tse, 317 Lautréamont, comte de, 92 Leavis, F.R., 44 Lee, Dennis, 284 Leibnitz, Gottfried, 168 Léry, Jean de, 179 Lestringant, Frank, 187 Levin, Harry, 82, 295, 305 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 79, 82, 84, 95–6, 114, 121, 140, 261, 293, 303, 305 Little, Jean, 288 Lohner, Erich, 72 Loti, Pierre, 313 Lotman, Yuri, 95 Lukács, Georg, 85, 94 Luther, Martin, 143, 174– 6, 183–5, 195, 199, 200 Lyotard, J.F., 17, 32 McConica, James, 216 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 262 McLuhan, Marshall, 54, 249 Mans, Jacques Pelletier du, 197 Margolin, Jean-Claude, 198, 212, 214, 237 Marguerite de Navarre, 125, 188, 194 Marrou, Henri Irénée, 73, 79, 91 Marston, John, 237 Martin, Luthur, 203 Marx, Karl, 84, 92 Maxwell, Mary Ann, 218 Mead, George H., 165 Metlinger, Bartholomaeus, 240 Metsys, Quentin, 219

Mickiewicz, Adam, 142 Miller, Hillis J., 24–5, 153, 206 Miller, Owen, 60 Millner-Vollner, Kurt, 72 Milner, Andrew, 44 Milosz, Czeslaw, 143–4 Miner, Earl, 36 Mollat du Jourdin, Michel, 194 Montaigne, Michel de, ix, 9, 91, 157, 177–8, 180– 1, 186–8, 204–5, 219, 234, 240, 242–3, 262 Montenegro, Alberto Varillas, 144 More, Thomas, 170, 179, 185, 204, 208, 212–14, 218, 243, 269 Munsch, Robert, 284, 287 Nagy, Gregory, 48 Napoléon, 119 Nelson, Cary, 44–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 314 Nikolaeva, Maria, 233 O’Neill, Eugene, 82, 297– 8, 307 Opie, Iona, 287 Opie, Peter, 287 Origen, 217 Orléans, Charles d’, 235 Orpheus, 318–19 Ovid, 297–8, 307 Parker, Patricia, 186 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 94 Pearson, Landon, 285 Perkins, David, 146–7 Perrot, Jean, 281, 283–4 Petrarch, ix, 103, 155, 176, 188, 221–31 Piaget, Jean, 83–4, 293, 303, 305 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 102 Pindar, 297 Pirandello, Luigi, 62 Plato, 91, 123, 158, 192, 217, 262, 274 Plutarch, 208

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Poliziano, A., 186, 297 Pontano, Giovanni, 235 Poulou, Bernadette, 284 Propp, Vladimir, 96, 114, 122, 293 Proust, Marcel, 85, 87–8, 91 Queneau, Raymond, 78 Quilligan, Maureen, 157 Quint, David, 186 Quintilian, 239–40 Rabelais, François, 81, 124, 197, 241 Racine, Jean, 299, 309 Ramée, Pierre de la, 198 Reedijk, Cornelius, 214 Regosin, Richard, 187 Rej, Mikolaj, 55 Ricoeur, Paul, 129, 130–2, 135, 160 Riffaterre, Michael, 135, 252 Rigolot, François, 223 Rilke, Rainer, 291 Rimbaud, Arthur, 313, 317, 326 Rogerus, Servatius, 215, 218 Ronsard, Pierre de, 221, 291 Rougemont, Denis de, 227 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 79 Rudnytsky, Peter L., 161 Rushdie, Salman, 252 St Anselm of Canterbury, 176, 183 St Augustine, 176, 183, 241, 262 St Exupéry, Antoine de, 282 St Jerome, 219 Samosata, Lucian of, 158, 193 Sanctis, Gaetano de, 147 Sankovitch, Tilde, 187

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 164, 281, 297, 299, 308–9, 321 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 117 Scève, Maurice, 195 Schipper, Mineke, 36 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 12, 74, 90 Screech, Michael, 242 Segalen, Victor, 292, 311– 27 Seng-hao, 317 Shakespeare, William, 178 Shelley, Mary, 297 Siddharta, 319 Sidney, Philip, 262 Siebers, Tobin, 25 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 281– 2 Sirois, Antoine, 55 Smith, Paul, 206 Smith, Sidonie, 206 Socrates, 192, 198 Sophocles, 81, 295, 297 Soriano, Marc, 280–1 Speroni, Sperone, 200 Staël, Mme de, 74 Starobinski, Jean, 116 Stimpson, Catharine, 156 Stock, Brian, 28 Stratford, Philip, 53, 55 Sutherland, Ronald, 55 Tacitus, 208–9 Taine, Hippolyte, 76 T’ao Ch’ien, 322 Taylor, Charles, 177, 180, 204–5 Tchang-Yen-Yuen, 326 Texte, Joseph, 76 Thompson, Craig R., 200 Todorov, Tzvetan, 12–13, 64, 180–1, 264 Trexler, Richard, 234, 236 Tripet, Arnaud, 229 Trousson, Raymond, 292, 301–3 Tunner, Erika, 146

Tyard, Pontus de, 193, 195, 221, 223, 231 Tynianov, Iurii, 95, 121 Valdés, Mario, 28, 61, 147, 159 Vattimo, Gianni, 29, 66, 154 Veeser, Aram, 205 Vega, Garcilaso de la, 155 Vergil, 297–8, 302, 307 Vickers, Nancy J., 157 Vico, Giambattista, 12, 92 Vivés, Juan Luis, 208, 238– 40 Voltaire, 110 Vredeveld, Harry, 215 Wallenrod, Konrad, 142 Warren, Austin, 34, 66 Wazyk, Adam, 143 Weinreich, H., 295 Weisstein, Ulrich, 34, 74, 76 Wellek, René, 34, 66, 84–5, 90, 94, 98, 140, 259 Wetz, Wilhelm, 76 White, Hayden, 129, 132, 134–5, 160, 260 White, J., 291 Whitehead, Alfred North, 32, 79, 324 Wiesner, Merry, 240 Wilde, Oscar, 90 Wilhelm, August, 74 Wilkins, E.H., 223 Williams, Raymond, 44–5 Williams, Tennessee, 297, 306, 308 Won Tao-Tseu, 324 Zola, Emile, 75 Zumthor, Paul, 48–9, 99, 124

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Subject Index

Actor, actorial, 298, 306, 309 Adlerian, 321 Aesthetic(s), 23, 26, 45, 46, 58, 94, 96, 111, 115, 120, 139, 144, 164, 228, 255, 269, 283, 287, 291, 292, 294, 301, 304, 308, 309, 311–15, 318, 319, 321, 324, 326 Aesthetization, re-aesthetization, 291, 303 Agency, 202, 203 Alienation, 282 Alterity, 173, 180, 186, 194, 285 Anachronism, 84, 177, 205, 301 Analogy, 288 Annals, 134 Anthological structure, 141, 142, 146 Anthropology, cultural anthropology, 111, 114, 117, 122, 164, 165, 252, 273, 274, 294, 295, 300, 303, 304, 321 Antiquarianism, 84, 90, 140

Appropriation, 61, 264, 279 Archetype, archetypal criticism, 263, 295, 304 Argumentation, 134, 197, 207, 209 Art, 87, 88, 95 Author, authorial, auctorial, 62, 100, 114, 120, 121, 211, 254, 296, 300, 302, 304, 305, 309, 311 Axiology, 23, 120 Babelism, 12 Baroque, 77, 93, 144, 227 Biblical narrative, 101 Biological evolution, evolutionism, 74, 89, 90, 113 Buddhism, 319, 326 Canon, canonize, canonization, canonicity, 16, 23, 24, 35, 42, 47, 58, 113, 118, 123, 128, 129, 141, 161, 251, 324 Cartesianism, 175, 202, 203, 207 Catholicism, 305

Cause, causation, causal, 56, 90, 113, 119, 131, 140, 260, 267 Child, child reader, 232– 46, 280, 288 Children’s literature, 57, 279–89 Christianity, 10, 143, 156, 181, 204, 210, 217 Chronicle, 134 Chronograph, 124 Circulation, 145 Class, 139, 157 Classical antiquity, 93, 101, 109, 119, 133, 155, 158, 169, 181, 203, 204, 221, 298, 301, 304 Classical studies, doctrines, 109, 112, 154, 155 Closure, non-closure, 110 Code, 99, 115 Cognitive (function, process), 62, 79, 94 Colloquy, 207, 209, 211, 244 Colonialism, colonization, 45, 139 Commentary, 118, 194

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Communication (literary, linguistic), 61, 96, 99 Comparability, 56, 67, 252, 258 Comparative literary history, 125, 126, 138–49, 160 Comparative literature, comparativism, 142, 290, 293–5, 311, 312, 314 Computer science, 115 Connotation, 291 Conscience, 183–5 Consciousness, 297, 320 Construction, 134, 147, 154, 160, 249 Context, contextual(ism), context, 94, 102, 104, 160, 176, 223, 254, 262, 264, 267, 285, 291–3, 301, 302, 304 Convention, 48, 80, 99, 192, 223, 252, 259, 263 Cornucopia, 101 Cosmopolitanism, 11, 14, 76, 111 Creativity, 269, 290, 321 Critical theory, 10, 111, 114, 167, 252, 255, 267, 275 Cultural anthropology, 68, 96, 106, 115, 154, 293 Cultural identity, specificity, history, 4, 15, 17, 21, 23, 28, 31, 43, 44, 52, 125, 138, 141, 143, 163, 173, 264, 275, 279, 284 Culturalism, 44 Cultural studies, 20, 27, 39–50, 57, 67, 280 Culture, 173 Curriculum, 42 Dada, 298 Dark Ages, 154 Decadentist, 313, 318 Decolonization, 15, 139 Deconstruction, deconstructive, 20, 34, 43, 46, 65, 94, 98, 123, 140, 161, 190, 191, 206

Defamiliarization (vs familiarity), ostranienie, 291, 296, 303, 309 Dérimage, 100 Determinism, determinacy, 76, 90, 113, 119, 267, 268 Diachrony, 78, 80, 83, 84, 86, 92, 94, 95, 98, 121, 128, 140, 258, 260, 295 Dialectic, 59, 84, 86, 95, 104, 140, 147, 159, 172, 178, 187, 192, 198, 275, 303, 311, 314, 327 Dialogue, dialogicity, 31, 35, 39, 43, 52, 101, 118, 124–6, 136, 140, 158, 159, 161, 168, 169, 173, 188, 190–201, 207, 211, 244, 250, 251, 283 Difference, 138–41, 143–7, 156, 166, 173, 231, 255, 279, 313 Discipline(s), 99, 106, 107, 111, 113, 114, 117, 133, 140, 311 Discontinuity, 146, 148, 155, 245, 259 Discourse, 134 Discourse analysis, 34, 57, 124 Displacement, 307 Dissidence, 58 Dogmatism, 43 Dominants, 105, 109 Doxographic writings, 101, 118, 158, 160, 194, 240 Drama, 254, 291, 292, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300– 10 Dualism, 11, 216 Early modern (premodern), 21, 39, 98, 154–6, 161, 169, 170, 174, 179, 186, 190, 191, 202, 205, 206, 219, 234 Ecole des Annales, 113, 117, 171 Ecology, 45 Emergence, emerg(ing), emerg(ent), 111, 123,

136, 138, 141, 175, 176, 178, 179, 195, 202, 205, 219, 233, 234, 252, 254, 255, 273 Empirical studies, 65, 280 Encyclopedia, encyclopedic structure, 101, 118, 141, 146, 147 Enlightenment, 11, 142–4 Epic, 90, 100, 251 Episteme, epistemic, 182, 196, 202 Epistemology, epistemological, 46, 83, 85, 95, 115, 141, 143, 148, 159, 164, 177, 198, 216, 250, 255, 283 Epistle, 194 Ethical, ethics, 24, 25, 43, 111, 153, 173, 197, 270, 314, 319, 322 Ethnicity, 45, 125, 157, 163, 173 Ethnography, 46 Eurocentric, eurocentricity, 4, 23, 41, 126, 291 Evolution, 145 Existentialism, 309 Exoticism, 313–15 Fact, factual, factuality, 99, 56, 113, 120, 128, 129, 132, 133, 140, 261 Factualism, 84, 90, 94 Feminism(s), 24, 34, 42, 46, 58, 65, 156, 158, 279 Fiction, fictionality, 27, 37, 61, 114, 126, 129, 131– 4, 137, 148, 160, 224, 240, 241, 251, 260, 263, 279, 280, 285, 286, 288, 292, 296 Film, 296, 302 Form, formalization, 48, 76, 95, 99, 100, 101, 107, 116, 118, 154, 158, 222, 224, 249, 251, 262, 294, 302–4, 321, 322 Formalism, 25, 27, 54, 65, 71, 80, 94, 95, 99, 112, 121, 261, 266

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Fragment(ation), 110, 146, 157 Freudian thought, 157, 298, 301, 305, 308, 321 Freudo-Marxism, 65 Function, functional relations, 264, 267, 272, 291, 293, 296, 306–9 Gay studies, writing, 41, 279 Geistesgeschichte, 118 Gender, gender studies, 41, 44, 45, 124, 139, 157, 163, 173, 279, 287 Generation, 144, 145 Genetic fallacy, 71, 77, 78, 98, 113 Genetic structuralism, 94 Genre, 36, 46, 48, 61, 74, 86, 90, 95, 99, 100, 101, 120, 124, 136, 140, 146, 155, 188, 207, 212, 252, 253, 262–4, 290, 291, 292 Globalization, 137 Golden Age, 142, 143 Grande rhétorique, 100 Hagiography, 101 Hegelianism, 91 Hegemony, 58, 59, 124 Hermeneutic(s), 10, 28, 41, 42, 66, 137, 168, 181, 183, 186, 293 Heroic legends, 101 Heterological, heterology, 13, 20, 29, 58, 181 Histoire des mentalités, 171 Historicism, new historicism, 72, 90, 94, 130, 161, 205 Historicity, 26, 39, 65, 67, 71, 72, 76, 77, 99, 109, 122, 123, 127, 136, 140, 171, 257–60, 263, 264 Historiography, 79, 82, 83, 85, 91, 102, 129, 131, 134, 135, 148, 153, 160, 171, 237, 261 History, 88, 89, 91–3, 95, 98, 99, 101, 111, 113,

117, 120, 122, 126, 127– 37, 140, 148, 157, 158, 166, 171, 173, 175, 178, 179, 181, 182, 190, 199, 222, 233, 237, 257–64, 267, 279, 300, 301–2, 304, 305, 313, 318 History of comparative literature, 33 History of philosophy, 166, 269 Homiletics, 101 Horizon of expectation, 100, 140, 309 Human consciousness, 260 Humanism, humanist(s), 4, 10, 25, 61, 67, 89, 93, 101, 103, 109, 111, 115, 119, 139, 146, 147, 154, 156, 157, 160, 163, 166, 191, 197, 198, 202, 204, 215, 217, 235, 239, 241– 3, 267, 269 Humanitas, 95, 163 Humanities, 4, 39, 40, 42, 86, 106, 107, 109, 113, 115, 138, 173, 190, 196, 197, 267 Human sciences, 64, 65, 67, 68, 106, 113, 121, 122, 163–4, 166, 250 Humour, 284 Hymn, 101 Hypogram, 230 Iconicity, 37 Idealism, idealistic, 221 Ideational, 294 Identity, 285 Identity of the text, 60, 61, 186 Ideology, 108, 135, 141–3, 166, 244, 254, 255, 271, 280, 309 Illustration, 282, 283, 285 Imagination, imaginary structures, 167, 289, 291, 293, 294, 296, 300, 302–5, 307, 311–13, 315, 317–19, 321–3, 325–7 Inclusion, 145

Indeterminacy, 255, 303, 322 Individuation, 123, 169, 187, 293, 306 Inductive (vs deductive) approaches, 92, 100, 104, 105, 125, 254 Influence, 34, 56, 110, 113, 311, 313, 319 Institution(al), institutionalization, 16, 40, 42–6, 52, 58, 59, 118, 128 Intellectual history, 93, 102, 118, 121, 126 Intentionality, intentional consciousness, 96, 114, 121, 168, 223 Intercultural(ity), 31, 35–7, 43, 126, 136, 250–2, 280, 313 Interdisciplinarity, 4, 52, 65, 66, 111, 115, 116, 147, 164 Interdiscursivity, 23, 164 Interhistoricity, 123, 191, 192 Internationality, internationalism, 21, 29, 31, 34, 43, 51, 108–10, 125, 141 Interpretation, 60, 61, 65, 98, 114, 115, 129, 130, 223, 254, 260, 270, 279, 301 Interpretive community, 60 Intersubjectivity, 153, 160, 167, 182, 184, 198 Intertext, intertextuality, 21, 79, 110, 296, 306 Intrinsic studies, 71, 89, 94, 114 Invention, 307 Inwardness, interiority, 181, 187, 206 Irony, ironic, 61, 110, 143, 198, 200, 260 Lacanian thought, 157 Language(s), 108–10, 125, 139, 144, 154, 193, 198, 203, 239, 251, 255, 262, 267, 272, 281, 283, 294, 295, 298, 304, 312, 323

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Lansonisme, 71, 72, 73, 77, 89 Letter(s), epistolary writings, 118 Linguistics, 20, 96, 106, 111, 113, 115–17, 122, 166, 169, 180 Literariness, 47, 60, 75, 100, 112, 122, 303, 304 Literary awareness, 102 Literary communication, 59, 112 Literary discourse, 99, 100, 102, 111, 122 Literary historiography, 72, 73, 77, 78, 89, 91, 96, 98, 118, 122, 141, 147 Literary history, history of literature, historians, 20, 27, 34–6, 39, 48, 56, 59, 64–7, 72–92, 93, 98, 99, 102, 106, 111, 113, 118– 21, 123–5, 128, 129, 133, 134, 136–49, 153– 5, 157, 160, 224, 229, 258–61, 263, 292, 301, 304, 311 Literary studies, 39, 50, 67, 89, 94, 96, 102, 106, 107, 112–14, 117, 118, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 138, 169, 250, 259, 280 Literary system, 47, 48, 99, 104, 108, 110, 112, 123, 251, 252, 257, 258–60, 263, 264, 266, 280 Literary theory, 20, 24–6, 34, 36, 39, 43, 52, 56, 57, 65–7, 95, 99, 111, 113, 118, 121, 122, 124– 7, 133, 168, 268 Manifesto, 59 Mannerism, 227 Marginalization, 157 Marxism, 46, 57, 94, 95, 122, 157, 166, 222, 269 Mass media, 44, 54 Materialism, 316 Meaning, 116, 132, 135, 154, 157, 166, 168, 181,

187, 198, 205, 217, 252, 255, 300–4, 309, 315, 320, 321, 327 Meistersang, 100 Mentalities, 100 Metafiction, 20, 47, 280 Metahistory, 260 Metalanguage, 58, 116, 293 Metanarrative, 4, 19, 23, 133, 147, 153 Metaphor, metaphorical, 77, 93, 127–37, 148, 159, 160, 191, 198, 216, 227, 261, 282, 294, 321 Metaphorization, 129, 130, 132 Metaphysics, metaphysical, 154, 296, 315 Metonymy, 135 Microcosm/macrocosm, 203, 327 Middle Ages, medieval, 154, 175, 221, 222, 241, 294 Mimesis, 159 Mimetic, high/low, 260 Modernism, modernity, 4, 61, 109, 110, 139, 145, 166, 175, 182, 204, 205, 317 Monadology, 168, 177 Monological, monologicity, 198 Monologue, 192 Monumentality, 154 Movement, 14, 292, 302 Multicultural(ism), 42, 43 Music, 48, 302, 312 Mytheme, 68, 81, 299, 305, 307 Myth(ical), mythos, 28, 48, 81–3, 108, 114, 131, 135, 136, 172, 181, 221, 251, 253, 255, 256, 258, 261, 263, 267, 268, 271, 290–9, 300–10, 321 Myth of concern vs myth of freedom, 269, 271–3, 275 Mythologem, 68, 81, 299, 307

Mythology, mythological drama, 81–3, 180, 255, 256, 290–9, 304 Narrating, narrativizing, narrativity, 134, 135 Narrative, narrative structure, form, principle, 129, 130–2, 135, 136, 141, 146, 147, 160, 251, 257, 258, 290–2, 294–6, 299, 300, 302–5, 308, 313 Narratology, 96, 114, 126, 169, 280 Narrator, 146, 326 Nationalism, nationhood, nationality, 21, 45, 93, 100, 107, 157 National literatures, 42, 56, 74, 78, 101, 107, 108, 111, 113, 124, 126, 134, 138, 145, 292, 311 Naturalism, 75, 88, 145 Natural sciences, 113 Neo-classical, neoclassicism, 12, 123, 145, 154 Neo-Platonism, 10 New Criticism, 25, 54, 65, 71, 89, 94, 112, 114, 121, 250, 260 Normativity, 62, 134 Nouvelle critique, 71, 89, 112, 114, 121, 168, 250, 267 Novel, 62, 75, 119, 254, 292, 293, 296 Novum, 58 Object, objectification, 120, 140, 164–7, 206, 226, 302, 312 Objectivity, 64, 67, 72, 79, 120, 130, 131, 137, 140, 143, 146, 167, 255, 322, 327 Opera, 292 Orality, oral texts, 28, 57, 110, 145, 272 Oriental, Orientalism, 14, 313

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Orphism, 319 Paradigm 59 Parnassus, Parnassian, 20, 120, 145, 323 Parody, 61 Perfectibility, 32, 74 Period, periodization, 64, 73, 77, 92, 93, 104, 119, 124, 133, 144, 145, 159, 175, 178, 182, 202, 205, 233, 258, 292, 302, 307, 315 Petrarchism, 221–31, 233 Phenomenology, phenomenologist, 85, 168 Philology, 93, 155, 239 Philosophy, 48, 101, 148, 165, 169, 209, 250, 267, 281, 295, 296, 315, 317, 320 Philosophy of history, 74, 91, 92, 120, 122, 171 Physics, 90, 113 Platonism, 10, 83, 314, 316 Play, 119, 304, 305 Pluralism, 17, 23, 26, 44, 126, 181, 196 Poet, poetry, poem, poeticity, 23, 37, 48, 57, 95, 96, 100, 101, 109, 110, 112, 119, 135, 139, 147, 154, 155, 157, 167, 169, 215, 221, 225, 226, 228, 233, 251, 252, 254, 255, 261–4, 271, 281, 287, 288, 291–4, 298, 302, 305, 311–15, 317, 320–3, 326, 327 Poetic (function, language), 36, 57, 60, 75, 110, 112, 130, 131, 214, 224, 227, 261 Poetics, 23, 36, 43, 99, 157, 167, 262, 280 Poetry and painting, 322– 6, 327 Polyphony, 168, 169 Polysemy, 116 Polysystem, 12, 16, 21, 35, 36, 58, 59, 66, 122, 123,

125, 128, 129, 136, 168, 280 Popular culture, literature, 54, 57, 101 Positivism, 64, 73, 77, 89, 94, 98, 113, 119, 134, 140, 167 Possible worlds, 27, 35, 37, 88, 126, 134, 279 Postcolonialism, postcolonial, 24, 42, 45, 56, 59, 65, 139, 264 Postmodern, postmodernism, postmodernity, 4, 17, 20, 23, 24, 31, 32, 40, 45, 51, 58, 61, 65, 123, 141, 146, 147, 153, 154, 165, 171, 175, 181, 188, 191, 202, 204, 205, 233 Poststructuralism, 24, 34, 39, 65, 135, 140, 175, 186 Power relations, 139, 161, 180, 204 Pragmatics, 65 Prague Linguistic Circle, 71, 112, 121 Presupposition, 108 Prosody, 42, 110 Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic approaches, 20, 46, 106, 114, 115, 180, 205, 321 Psychohistory, 113, 117, 229 Psychology, psychologization, 111, 116, 166, 282, 283, 288, 300, 308 Quantitative, non-quantitative methods, 113, 117, 134, 171 Race, 45 Reader, reader response, reading, 60, 62, 91, 94, 95, 112, 120–2, 131, 136, 147, 156, 159, 168, 186, 194, 196, 198, 214, 216, 219, 254, 255, 259, 264, 267, 270, 272, 280–

3, 285, 286, 291, 296, 300, 306, 312, 315, 317, 318, 322, 323 Realism, realistic, 88, 120, 139, 221, 223, 251 Reception, aesthetic reception, receptor, 23, 35, 100, 112, 116, 122, 140, 145, 160, 253, 256, 264, 279, 280, 293, 301, 306, 311, 319 Reconstruction, 94, 113, 118, 134, 171, 215 Re-enactment, 91, 92, 120, 171, 296, 298, 299, 318, 324 Referential(ity), non-referentiality, 62 Relativism, relativity, relativeness, 43, 67, 123, 197, 256 Renaissance, 11, 12, 39, 92, 93, 98, 99, 100, 102, 111, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 133, 154–9, 161, 169, 175, 178, 181, 182, 191, 192, 196, 197, 198, 202, 204, 206, 207, 212, 214, 221, 222, 232–4, 237, 245, 262, 298, 318 Rhetoric(al), 43, 101, 157, 159, 197, 198, 200, 215, 216, 218, 219, 238 Romanticism, Romantic era, 12, 15, 108, 119, 120, 142, 145, 315, 321 Satire, 92, 101, 258 Scenographic, 309 Science fiction, 57 Science(s), scientificity, pseudo-scientificity, scientism, 10, 21, 32, 33, 45, 67, 74, 84, 90, 99, 100, 101, 107, 114, 119, 120, 126, 129, 130, 131, 141, 144, 148, 197, 204, 267, 283 Scientific revolution, 233 Secondary modelling system, 95

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338

Subject Index

Self-appropriation, 204 Self-awareness, 178, 188, 204, 273, 274 Self-fashioning, 176, 178– 80 Self-referentiality, 60, 110, 154 (self)-reflexivity, 66, 177, 181, 204 Semiotics, semiotic approaches, 34, 39, 62, 66, 71, 79, 99, 111, 115, 121, 128, 131, 169, 184, 230, 267 Signification, 65 Signified, 4, 68, 301, 303, 304, 322 Signifier, 4, 68, 75, 102, 301, 303, 304, 322 Social class, 287 Social discourse, 57, 59, 65, 102, 104, 113, 121, 122, 136 Social history, 232, 233, 235 Socialism, 58 Social philosophy, 273, 275 Social realism, 143 Social sciences, 41, 96, 106, 107, 109, 112–14 Sociocriticism, 34, 44, 95, 114, 280 Sociology, 106, 116, 282, 300 Sociology of literature, 44, 280 Source, 34, 85 Space, 145, 187, 251, 258, 293, 298, 303, 308, 312, 314, 323, 324, 326 Space-time continuum, 324 Spectator, 296, 298, 299, 300, 303, 306, 309, 318, 323, 325 Speech-act theory, 47, 60, 65, 264 Spiritualization, 323–6 Stoicism, 203 Structural analysis, 96, 293 Structural anthropology, 20, 84 Structuralism, 10, 20, 39, 65, 71, 72, 79, 80, 83,

84, 99, 114, 121, 134, 140, 250, 260, 261, 266, 292, 293, 295, 300, 303 Structure, 83–5, 94, 96, 100, 114, 116, 140, 166, 192, 251–3, 258, 261, 263, 266, 280, 291, 292, 296, 303, 305, 311, 312 Style, stylistic, 222, 251, 302, 309 Subject, subjectivity, subjectivism, 25, 46, 62, 64, 67, 72, 79, 92, 120, 130, 131, 137, 140, 143, 146, 153, 154, 163–9, 171, 175, 177, 179, 182, 184, 187, 188, 202–20, 226, 233, 240, 245, 255, 268, 272–4, 279, 280, 314, 322, 327 Surrealism, 92, 118, 305, 321 Symbol, symbolization, symbolical, 251, 259, 275, 282, 288, 290, 295, 298, 304–9, 312, 315, 323 Symbolism, 15, 108, 120, 142, 313, 315, 317, 326 Synchrony, 78–84, 86, 92, 94, 95, 98, 109, 121, 128, 258, 260, 295 Taoism, 317–22, 324, 326, 327 Textuality, text, 45, 49, 60, 91, 95, 98, 99, 104, 107, 110, 112–14, 121, 122, 124, 136, 154, 156, 157, 160, 161, 182, 186, 187, 219, 223, 225, 254, 268, 279, 280, 282, 283, 285, 287, 290, 298, 303, 310 Theatre, 62, 100, 297 Theatricality, 292, 295, 306, 308 Thematology, 20, 81, 114, 301 Theme, thematic, 100, 107, 108, 109, 121, 146, 262, 284, 292, 302

Theory, theorizing, theorization, 120, 127, 156, 197, 198, 267, 268, 279, 291, 299, 300, 303 Theory of history, of literary history, 25–6, 131, 157 Time, temporality, 119, 120, 132, 135, 136, 140, 145, 157, 187, 190, 225, 251, 258, 260, 261, 263, 293, 296, 301, 303, 312, 314 Topos, topoi, 93, 100 Tradition, 80, 85, 86, 93, 99, 101, 110, 139, 145, 221, 223, 224, 251, 294, 304, 322 Transgression, transgressiveness, 28, 45, 54, 58, 136 Treatise, 118 Typology, 12, 26, 27, 30–7, 135, 146, 167, 169, 181, 194, 200, 286 Undecidability, 197, 198 Universal(s), universality, universalism, 4, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 23, 27, 33, 34, 43–5, 66, 68, 86, 99, 109, 126, 138, 145, 148, 160, 164, 177, 196, 204, 206, 249–51, 253–5, 258–60, 280, 293, 294, 314, 317, 320, 324, 325 Validity, 107, 116, 120, 121, 124, 143, 148, 195, 197, 260, 291 Vernacular, 100, 119, 155, 222, 245 Weltliteratur, 111 Werkimmanente Interpretation, 114, 121 World literature, 112, 123, 124, 285, 291, 294